Sales Force Design

The sales force is a company’s most critical customer contact point and has a direct impact on its top line. For many firms, it is not only the most valuable and expensive asset—costing up to 40% of sales—but also the most complex. Sales force design merits close attention because it can have significant impact on costs, customer coverage and revenue.

Sales force design encompasses three issues:

• The structure of the sales force—defining roles, formulating teams and establishing reporting relationships
• The investment in the sales force—determining the appropriate investment level for the overall selling organization
• The allocation of effort and assignment of roles—across products, customer segments and sales force activities

Senior managers regularly struggle with the complicated issues surrounding these important decisions. While many benefits of a new sales force design—such as growing revenue and creating a scalable, flexible organization—are realized in the future, the immediate impact can be a downturn—due to one-time investment costs as well as organizational and customer disruption. The implications of downsizing or upsizing the sales organization must also be carefully considered. Developing the right solution requires a process that combines objective, fact-based analysis with the collective experience of the sales managers

In case you are planning to restructure or study your sales force design follow the below stated points

• Develop a process that links upstream decisions such as customer segmentation and value proposition with downstream implementation considerations such as customer disruption, territory design and micro-marketing
• Adopt an objective and fact-based approach to decision-making by incorporating internally- and externally-available data and leveraging collective management experience
• Create recommendations for the most appropriate sales force structure, overall investment level, role assignment and resource allocation
• Understand the implications of various external and internal events on the final recommendation
• Implement change so as to minimize the impact of customer disruption and enhance long-term benefits

Reference Books :

Sales Force Design for Strategic Advantage

This is a sourcebook for strategic sales force planning and management, delving deeply into core issues of sales force design, including examples and practical frameworks, it is written for sales executives and managers with strategic sales responsibility.

The insights presented in this book can help successfully create, expand, downsize, merge or restructure a sales organization for maximum impact in today’s rapidly evolving business environment. With its strategic focus, the book is uniquely positioned to drive effective sales force strategy and implementation.

Other Books of interest