How to Structure a SaaS Sales Organization

You've hired one sales person and are growing quickly. To sustain that momentum, you hire more. How are you going to structure your sales team? There are three common approaches: the horizontal Island structure, the Assembly Line approach, and the hybrid Pod model.

The impact: Organization occurs naturally, so it's best to preempt that natural organization with the model you feel fits best with your company culture and sales process.

The goal: Consider the pros and cons of each model in relationship to your company's culture and objectives to determine which sales team organizational model will work best for your company.

How can Golden Section Assist?

Background

There are three different approaches to structuring a sales team.

The Island: this is a more traditional, individualist approach to sales team structure. In this structure, each Sales Rep is responsible for carrying their leads through the entire sales process from generation to close.

Pros:

1. Sales Reps get to see the entire sales process and are more committed to meet overall company targets.

Cons:

1. This typically leads to a more competitive team environment since each SR is independently competing with the others to meet quota.

\[https://blog.close.com/sales-management-3-models-of-sales-team-organization(https://blog.close.com/sales-management-3-models-of-sales-team-organization)\]

The Assembly Line: in this approach, you break down the sales process into different functions and assign a team to cover each area. The four teams are generally: Lead Generation, Sales Development Representatives, Account Executives, Customer Success.

1. The Lead Generation team is responsible for developing leads, researching demographic and pertinent information, and creating new accounts in the CRM.
2. The Sales Development team qualify leads. They establish initial conversations, gather information to develop the appropriate sales strategy for that lead, identify the decision-making process within the prospect's company, and qualify the lead.
3. Account Executives are responsible for closing the deal. They give demos, prepare proposals, send contracts, negotiate, and ultimately close the deal.
4. The Customer Success team receives the account once a deal is closed. They work by the account management process, onboarding new customers and then work to ensure adoption and expand accounts in the future.

Pros:

1. Specialization like this allows each team to deeply explore the process within their function and improve it. They intimately experience any weaknesses in a process and will work to fix them. Each area of the sales process becomes highly efficient.
2. Each team is also solely responsible for a given task, so it becomes easier to isolate any bottlenecks in the funnel.
3. Under this structure, it is much less likely for a prospect to get stuck too long at a particular stage. A team is naturally incentivized to move a prospect quickly through their sphere of influence and then to pass it along.
4. With an assembly line structure, your sales process is more scalable and can keep pace as your company grows and the sales process becomes more complex.

Cons:

1. This would be difficult for a small sales team to accomplish.
2. Certain roles (like Sales Development reps) might be hard to retain; it is a particularly repetitive, low creativity, and unrewarding component of the sales process.
3. As a team, you have to be very disciplined at recording customer needs, values, etc. A customer could quickly become frustrated by repeat questions, or important information could be lost in the transfer between teams.

{width="6.501056430446194in" height="1.7083333333333333in"}

\[https://www.organimi.com/building-a-sales-team-structure/assembly-line-sales-tea(https://www.organimi.com/building-a-sales-team-structure/assembly-line-sales-team/) m/(https://www.organimi.com/building-a-sales-team-structure/assembly-line-sales-team/)\]

The Pod: this approach is an iteration of the assembly line structure. Instead of having a large Lead Gen team and a large SD team, etc., a pod is created with one SDR, one AE, and one CS rep. A person inside the pod is responsible for a specialized sales role and the combined pod is responsible for the entire sales journey of a specific group of customers. Success is measured on the pod level, and pods can be specialized in different verticals, personas, locations, etc.

Pros:

1. In the pod model, you blend the competitive approach of the Island with the team approach of the Assembly Line, resulting in a more collaborative, yet still competitive sales team.

Cons:

1. There is less opportunity to isolate individual sales rep's efficacy and push them to compete and grow.

{width="5.875374015748031in" height="4.354166666666667in"}

\[https://www.saleshacker.com/sales-team-organizational-structure/(https://www.saleshacker.com/sales-team-organizational-structure/)\]

Steps

1. Using the template provided, consider where your sales team is now and where you would like them to be in the future.
2. Using the organizational framework given above and the vision you have for your sales team, list the pros and cons of each organizational model for your company.
3. Choose the model that most suits the present needs and culture of your company