The Problems with "Lumping"; Separate the Four Core Sales Functions

This post builds off a prior one, “We have a different sales structure here, the sales people just sell!”

Building a highly productive, modern sales organization requires increasing specialization – and frankly, it’s a big reason salesforce.com has such an amazing sales organization. Though they take it to the extremes – you wouldn’t believe the number of different kinds of sales groups, inside and out, that salesforce.com has 🙂

One of the biggest sources of lost productivity is the practice of lumping a mix of different responsibilities (such as raw web lead qualification, cold prospecting, closing, account management…) into one general “sales” role.

Issues contributed to by lumping

• Lack of focus: Salespeople juggle too many responsibilities, reducing their ability to get things done. Salespeople have a reputation for being ADD – how does adding more responsibilities help that? For example, qualifying web leads is a much lower value distraction for salespeople from managing current clients. And managing a large current client base is a distraction from closing new clients!
• Talent development: It’s challenging to bring in raw talent and develop them with a progressive career path. This is unfortunate, because homegrown talent usually ends up being the best! (also see “Where do I hire great salespeople?”)
• Metrics: It’s harder to break out and keep track key metrics (inbound leads, qualification and conversion rates, customer success rates…)
• Problem-solving: When things aren’t working, lumped responsibilities obscure what’s happening and make it more difficult to isolate and fix issues with accountable follow through.

The four core functions / themes

Here are four basic themes (I say ‘theme’ because even each of these functions can be sub-divided even further as your organization gets bigger):

1. “Inbound” Lead Qualification: Commonly called Market Response Reps, they qualify marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800#. The sources of these leads are either marketing programs/SEO or organic word-of-mouth. Presentation: Inbound Lead Management Best Practices

2. “Outbound” Prospecting/Cold Calling 2.0: Commonly called Sales Development Reps or New Business Development Reps, they prospect into lists of target accounts to develop incremental new sales opportunities that don’t already exist, that require a lot of proactive work. These outbound reps qualify their new sales opportunities and then pass them to Account Executives to close. Presentation: Introduction to Cold Calling 2.0

3. Account Executives: Quota-carrying closers, either inside or in the field. As a best practice, even when a company has an Account Management/Customer Success function, Account Executives should stay engaged with a new customer past the close and until they are deployed/launched. Also see “Sell To Success (The All-Natural Close)”
4. Account Management / Customer Success: client deployment and success, ongoing client management and renewals. In today’s world of frictionless karma, someone needs to be dedicated to making customers successful – and that is NOT the salesperson!

When to specialize?

I frequently hear “we’re too small to specialize yet”. Every company is so different, it’s tough to generalize. One rule of thumb is: “sooner than you think”…even if you just have a handful of Account Executives. A second rule of thumb I like is the 80/20 rule – when your reps, as a group, are spending more than 20% of their time on a non-core function (web lead qualification, cold account prospecting, account management), break out that function into a new role. Yes, I said 20%!

Here are a couple examples. Regardless of how many Account Executives (AEs) you have, if you’re getting a couple of hundred inbound leads per month you should have or planning to have an inside Market Response Rep qualifying them for the AEs. Or if you already have 3-4 AEs, rather than making your next hire another AE, consider an outbound Sales Development rep who can spend 100% of their time working to feed the AEs.

Questions? I’ll answer in the comments

This is really just a first introduction to the topic – we could drill ad naseum into the mechanics, metrics, comp, career paths… (as I said, nauseum) of the different groups and how the relate to each other. If you have specific questions, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Puzzle pieces

Finally, as with every other idea in this blog… take this with a grain of salt. You’ll have to pick and choose which puzzle pieces here are right for you, and how they fit into your business. My rule of thumb from experience is the 80/20 rule: 80% of the puzzle pieces here can should be plugged into your business, and 20% shouldn’t or should be heavily customized.