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4. Over time, your sales professionals and your consulting professionals must marry up. Independence equates to a decrease in effectiveness.
If sales professionals commit themselves to learning the business and professional consultants commit to respecting and understanding sales, a true partnership can form.
Assuming you are moving toward meeting the four critical success factors, then, what makes a good sales organization? Characteristics of any good sales organization include:5
• An organizational structure that ref lects a market orientation
• An organization that is built around activities and not around the people performing these activities
• Responsibilities that are clearly spelled out and sufficient authority granted to meet the responsibility
• A reasonable span of executive control
• Stability combined with f lexibility
• Balanced and coordinated activities both within the sales department and between sales and nonmarketing departments
The following sections provide insight into integrating sales and marketing, establishing territories, determining the size of your team, and creating a compensation plan.
Integrating Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing are both engines of revenue generation; thus it is imperative that these organizations be aligned with the firm’s overall business strategy and with each other. So, how does a firm align sales and marketing?
Before understanding how to move forward, it is important to understand from where we’re starting. Let’s take a step back and look at a fairly universal marketing and sales model:6
• Marketing’s responsibility is build brand awareness, generate leads, and provide sales tools.
• Marketing generates leads through a number of vehicles.
• As leads come in, the leads are handed off to sales.
• At that point, marketing’s role has been fulfilled and they disengage.
• Sales takes over by a field sales lead maturation process.
This approach toward lead generation and selling does work; however, this traditional model has some drawbacks, most noteworthy the lack of continuous teamwork. In the preceding process outline, sales and marketing do not
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operate as a unified, long-term client team, with a common goal of selling and servicing the client and the overall firm. There is a hands-off process once the lead shifts hands from marketing to sales. While this model is based on a product-centric company, it can be applied to professional services as well.
An integrated sales and marketing organization and approach, focused on serving the whole company and the client will reduce, or even eliminate, the animosity and finger pointing that sometimes exist between sales and marketing. And, in the end, both the client and your revenue stream will benefit.
As you strategize the organization of your salesforce, remember to integrate sales and marketing. Three key areas to keep in mind are:
1. Reporting structure: Create an organizational reporting structure in which the heads of both organizations report to one individual. Ideally, this individual is a marketing generalist with a strong sales background.
This reporting structure facilitates communication and cooperation.
2. Sell the way your customers want to buy: Your sales and marketing organizations should focus on the customer and facilitate the buying process. The goal of any sales organization is to sell the way your customers want to buy; in other words, assume an “outside looking in” view of
your sales process. Regular communication between the sales and mar-
keting organizations is thus essential in understanding the client and developing the right tools to touch the customer and facilitate the sales process.
3. Understand each other’s role: To truly work as a team, both sales and marketing need to understand what each function does and then learn
to balance and coordinate those activities. Marketing needs to understand the sales process, and sales needs to understand how marketing works and have knowledge of the resources available to help generate leads and close business.
A sales organization, integrated with marketing, will strengthen your firm’s ability to generate revenue and build sustainable client and industry relationships.
Establishing Territories
The word territories suggests the division of a salesforce on some basis of specialization, whether geography, type of product or service sold, class of customer, or some combination of these or other meaningful categories. In the professional services environment, two key criteria must exist as you establish your sales territories:
1. The salesforce must belong to the whole company. To belong to the whole company, your salesforce must represent the firm’s entire range
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of services and not a single professional. Your salesforce must be trained to cross-sell. This approach contrasts with the standard consultant sales model, in which the professional sells only his or her particular service line to a wide range of clients. This model is inwardly
focused because the selling mirrors the firm’s internal structure. The consultant sales model often promotes an organization based on fiefdoms, as practice leaders are faced with a pressure that says, “I have to sell in order to feed the people in my pyramid.” Establishing a sales organization, if done correctly, will help your firm operate as a consistent, consolidated team, selling and providing the full benefits of all service offerings to clients. The firm and the client will benefit as the sales professional will sell in a wider set of services and the right consultant team every time.
2. The salesforce must be organized by the external marketplace. Territories are collections of people who buy your firm’s services; thus, organize your territories as your client groups are organized. For example, FTI’s buyers are law firms and corporations, and sales professionals are assigned prospective accounts within these two markets. Training your sales professionals to sell the firm’s complete line of services is also characteristic of organizing by the external marketplace, because a client’s service need is often broad, encompassing much or all of
what the firm offers.
In addition to the preceding key criteria, three tips to establishing sales territories are:
1. Ensure that each sales professional has his or her own “patch,” or territory. You don’t want a sales structure that leads to territory competition between peers.
2. Make sure that each sales professional has the same number of buyers to call on. Over time, be open to changing territories to match chemistry between the sales professionals and the prospects.
Take a hard-to-crack account and give it to a new, enthusiastic sales representative.
3. Divide territories along geographical lines where feasible. Travel is extremely expensive, and this is the economically sound approach to sales organization.
While these tips are straightforward, it is important to note that the assignment of territories is a science. Managers have an inclination to assign large territories to generate increased market penetration. To the contrary, making territories smaller is often the right answer.
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When Less = More
While I was a sales professional with a large data processing company, our territories were assigned by Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) breakdowns.
During my first year, I was handed 1,000 D&B cards with all of the companies in my territory that might buy our services. Every year, sales management took away some of my territory and raised my quota, and
every year, I sold more than the previous year. During my last year with this company, my territory had dwindled to only 200 D&B cards, 25 percent of what I had my first year, and yet I sold four times as much as when I had five times as many prospects!
The message in this story is that if a sales professional focuses on something, he or she gets results. The ability to go broad and deep within the target base is important to good selling. On average, you can get about 20
percent revenue growth by totally serving your current clients and selling more services; however, you can’t get 30 percent. Your job, as a manager, is to coach your sales professionals on how to go broad and deep within their target market and add new accounts at the same time. You will likely find that your sales professionals will often ask for larger territories, especially when they are new. In response to this, give them as many targets as they ask for and tell them that, over time, together you will reduce the list. Let the sales professional feel some control of his or her territory.
Determining the Size of Your Team
The size of your sales organization will depend on many variables, including:
• Budget: How much is firm leadership willing to invest in the sales organization? An effective sales organization is not created by headcount alone; you must have the supporting budget for recruiting, commission schedules, training programs, and marketing activities.
• Market potential: What will the market bear? Is the market growing, or is demand for your services declining? How many potential buyers are there for your services?
• Revenue potential: What quota is attached to your organizations? How many sales professionals are required to generate that level of new business?
In the initial stages of salesforce development, I recommend that you start small and focus a handful of sales professionals on a number of key territories. This first phase of your organization development is aimed at gaining traction in the marketplace and demonstrating your worth to the firm’s leadership. As the support for the sales organization grows, the budget, market,