Structuring the sales force

Many leaders confuse "having salespeople" with "having a sales force". Hiring three or four people who sell does not create a team: it creates three or four ways of selling, three or four versions of the pitch, and as many ways of tracking deals. Structuring the sales force means making sure that energy pulls in the same direction, that everyone knows what they have to do, on whom, and how we measure whether they get there. That is what turns a sum of individuals into a predictable sales machine.

I work on this structuring within my fractional Head of Sales support: we don't slap a theoretical org chart on top, we build the organisation that fits your stage, your sales cycle and your goals. Here, concretely, is what that covers.

Organising the sales team

Organising a team isn't about drawing boxes on a diagram. It's about answering very concrete questions: who talks to whom, who decides what, and at what point a deal moves from one person to another. Until those answers are written down, everyone improvises, and improvisation does not duplicate. The day you hire your fifth person, they have nothing to lean on.

The first instinct is to separate what should be separated. In a somewhat mature B2B sale, three key moments exist: finding and qualifying the right contacts, running the negotiation through to signature, then supporting the client once they have said yes. While the company is small, one person does everything. As it grows, keeping these three moments on the same shoulders becomes a drag: the person best at closing spends their days prospecting, and the signed client is poorly followed up because everyone is chasing the next contract. Organising means deciding who carries what, and in what order the deal moves along.

A good starting point is to map your current sales journey, from first contact to loyal customer, and to spot where it jams. Often the diagnosis is clear: too much time spent hunting for prospects, poorly prepared meetings, customers won then forgotten. The organisation follows from that observation, not from a model copied off another company.

Defining the roles: who opens, who closes, who keeps

Sales jobs often carry English names that act as a barrier. Behind the jargon, the idea is simple: at each stage of the relationship, a type of person, with their own know-how.

• The SDR (Sales Development Representative) opens the doors. Their job is to prospect, sort the interesting contacts and land the first qualified meetings. They don't close, they prepare the ground. It's a job of volume, consistency and resistance to "no", very different from negotiation.
• The AE (Account Executive) takes over on the meeting obtained. This is the salesperson in the classic sense: they understand the need, demonstrate the value, run the negotiation and get the signature. They turn interest into a customer. It's the role that demands the most ease in relationships and negotiation.
• The CSM (Customer Success Manager) comes in once the contract is signed. Their role is to make the client succeed with your product, to support them, to help them get value from it, and therefore to keep them and grow them over time. In many models, most of the revenue comes from retention and upselling: this role is anything but secondary.

The whole challenge is to get the dosage right. A young company doesn't need three separate teams from day one. But it does need to know these three functions exist, and to decide which to separate first. Most often, you start by freeing the salesperson who closes from the chore of prospecting, because that's where the gain is clearest.

Splitting territories and accounts

Once the roles are set, you have to divide the ground. Otherwise two reps call the same prospect the same week, or conversely, whole accounts are never worked because no one feels responsible. The split is what avoids duplicates and gaps.

Several splitting logics exist, and the right choice depends on your market:

• By geography: each rep handles a region. Simple, readable, useful when proximity matters or when you address a lot of small businesses.
• By account size: the big potential clients to an experienced person, the smaller ones to another. The sales cycles have nothing in common, so best not to mix them.
• By industry: one rep becomes the expert in manufacturing, another in retail. They know the vocabulary, the stakes, the references, and gain credibility.
• By type of demand: inbound contacts on one side, outbound prospecting on the other, because they don't call for the same reflexes.

The golden rule: each account has one and only one owner, and everyone knows which. The split must also be fair in potential, not just in the number of accounts. Giving someone many lines with no potential and another a few gems creates frustration and distorts any performance comparison.

Sizing to your goals

"How many reps do we need?" The right answer isn't guessed, it's calculated, starting from the target and working backwards. It's the opposite of the common reflex, which is to hire first and hope the revenue follows.

The reasoning goes like this. Take the revenue target to reach. Estimate what a seasoned rep can produce once fully up to speed, for example based on what your best performers already achieve. Divide: you get the number of fully productive people needed. But that figure is a theoretical floor. In real life, you must correct it for two realities: a new rep often takes several months to reach cruising speed, and not everyone stays. The real hiring need is therefore higher than the raw calculation.

This work also forces you to face your numbers. How many meetings does it take to sign a client? How many prospects contacted to get a meeting? Once these ratios are known, you no longer size just the number of reps, but the whole chain: if you want so many signatures, you need so many meetings, so much prospecting upstream. That's what links team sizing to your process and your CRM, which must supply these figures reliably.

Building a healthy variable pay plan

Variable pay (the results-based part of the salary) is the share that depends on performance. Well designed, it aligns the rep's interest with the company's. Badly designed, it drives the wrong behaviours and poisons the mood. It's one of the most powerful levers to steer a team, and one of the easiest to get wrong.

A few principles hold over time:

• Pay for what you really want. If you pay on signed revenue without checking whether the client stays, don't be surprised to see reps sign clients who leave after three months. Variable pay must point to the useful result, not to a raw number.
• Keep it simple to understand. A rep should be able to work out their bonus in their head. A formula with six parameters motivates no one, it worries them. If you have to explain it for an hour, it's too complicated.
• Adapt it to each role. You don't pay an SDR like an AE. The first is rewarded on the qualified meetings they generate, the second on the contracts signed, the CSM on retention and account growth. Each sees the effect of their own work.
• Keep a coherent fixed-to-variable balance. Too much fixed lulls people to sleep, too much variable makes the job precarious and drives the good ones away. The right balance depends on the role and the level of risk.

One last, often neglected point: pay must be able to evolve without breaking everything. If you change the rules every quarter, you lose the team's trust. Set a clear framework, announce changes in advance, and keep your word.

Scaling up without breaking what works

Growing a sales force is a balancing act. What works with three reps no longer works with ten, and yet you can't change everything at once without destabilising what already produces results. Scaling up is steered in stages.

The principle is to industrialise before you multiply. Before adding five people, make sure a new rep's arrival is well prepared: that they know what to sell, to whom, with what pitch, and that they reach cruising speed within a predictable time. That's the role of an onboarding path and a written sales playbook. Without it, every hire starts from scratch and the founder spends their time training instead of leading.

Then comes the question of management. Beyond five or six people, the leader can no longer follow everything themselves. You have to bring out a first level of management, someone whose job becomes making others progress and no longer just selling. It's a deep change, one that touches on day-to-day sales management: leading, coaching, running the rituals, dealing with underperformance. Many companies grow fast in headcount and forget this level, then find themselves with a large team left to fend for itself.

The mistakes that cost dearly

The most frequent by far is to hire before structuring. You tell yourself that hiring reps will mechanically lift revenue, so you hire, fast, often too much. But reps thrown into a fuzzy organisation, with no clear role, no defined territory, no process or tool to track their deals, almost always fail. They leave after a few months, the leader concludes they were bad, and starts again. The problem wasn't the people, it was the absence of a framework.

Other traps come up often:

• Making everything rest on the founder. As long as the best sale is still the leader's and no one else knows how to reproduce their approach, the company hangs on one person. Structuring means making the sale independent of its founder.
• Copying a bigger company's organisation. Setting up specialised teams and heavy tools when you sign ten clients a year weighs you down without gaining efficiency. The structure must match your stage.
• Confusing activity with result. Lots of calls, lots of meetings, but few signatures: busyness is not performance. Without clear numbers, you reward motion rather than result.
• Hiring to fill a gap, with no defined profile. Hiring a "versatile" rep for lack of choosing which job you need risks landing a person who is neither good at prospecting nor at closing.