Sales organization: definition and advice

A good sales organization is of paramount importance to a company’s operational efficiency and effectiveness. We will advise you on how to optimize this to improve your sales and turnover.

Sales organization: definition

The sales organization concerns the sales force, the primary function of which is to sell your company’s products or services thanks to various contacts with potential customers, distributors, or prescribers of these products.

The salesforce complements the marketing strategy to boost sales of your products. Having a sales organization is therefore essential for improving efficiency and outcomes. Team members must know their allotted tasks, responsibilities, but also the challenges and objectives.

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Sales organization: the diversity of sales teams

Sales teams comprise two types of team: sedentary and mobile. Both have different jobs to do to maximize the sales of your products and services.

Sedentary teams

The members of a secondary team work synergistically with mobile teams. They are responsible for prospecting for new customers by making appointments with them for the mobile members. Sedentary sales staff work both in the front office and back office. In addition to selling offerings to customers, they also look after sales tracking, logistics, procurement, point of sales materials, shelf management…

Mobile teams

These teams represent the field sales force. They are involved in prospecting by visiting customers or contacting them by telephone or Internet to interest them in their offerings. Their role is also to support prospects through to the sales stage and to keep track of them. These sales representatives may be attached to companies or act on behalf of several companies.

Why set up a sales organization?

As your company expands, it becomes essential to create a sales organization. This will make you more capable and responsive, enabling you to grow faster and boost your turnover.

More predictable sales

Creating a sales organization enables you to manage your organization. In addition to providing an overview of sales forecasts, you scale your resources to increase your profitability in all situations.

This organization requires the creation of processes and tools enabling you to monitor your prospects as they progress through the sales pipeline: better visibility, spotting new opportunities, measurement of the conversion rates and sales cycle duration.

Increased sales

The various processes and indicators put in place to increase your organization’s sales enable you to plan and manage your resources. If your objective is strong growth over a specific period, you may decide to add more salespeople or advertising budget to increase your sales.

More efficient sales forces

Your understanding of future sales with this new sales organization also enables you to make your teams more efficient. They experiment directly with your processes in the field, and this is readily measurable thanks to the various indicators that exist. You can use this high degree of agility to regularly introduce new processes, together with prospecting or follow-up scenarios to maximize your results.

Why create a sales organization?

The sales organization is a challenge for every company wishing to boost their long-term growth. It factors in the company’s various characteristics, its goals, and salespeople’s expectations. A good sales organization must be clear and specific for all its teams if it is to motivate and encourage them.

Sales organization by business sector

Your sales organization can be structured by business sector. This type of organization enlists certain sales personnel and improves their expertise in the market assigned to them. Detailed product knowledge enables them to respond quickly to customer needs, to evaluate opportunities and competitor practices.

Various prospects and customers may be spread between various locations within the territory. That entails long journeys for your salespeople, affecting their productivity. This model is also used for high value-added sales. Very often, organization by business sector is combined with geographical organization to restrict the prospecting territory to a specific area.

Sales organization by geographical sector

The sales organization by geographical sector reduces sales personnel movements, optimizing productivity, working time, and performance. It can operate by postcode or department at national level. At a global level, it is broken down by economic area.

Salespeople working within this organizational type know the players within their prospecting area. There may be some tension between salespeople when these areas are not fairly distributed.

Sales organization by company size

Needs and expectations may differ, as may sales processes, according to the company’s size. Depending on the objectives defined by the company, the sales organization by company size confers the ability to allocate salespeople depending on their skills and experience.

Sales organization by product or service line

A company offering different products or services can allocate its sales personnel by line or family. This technique enables teams to develop genuine expertise in the ranges for which they are responsible. They add value by advising their prospects and customers, and by following up until the ranges are updated.

Sales organization: which indicators does one monitor?

To manage your organization, it is important to establish some performance indicators. The purpose of these indicators is to measure the outcome of actions taken to achieve goals:

• In the B2B sector, the key indicators are the lead and Demand Unit. The lead is a potential customer showing interest in a product or service. The Demand Unit comprises a group of purchasers, not an individual contact. Corporate decisions are taken as a group, not by an individual. It also takes account of the needs expressed by a lead, because the lead may have several needs. By combining these two items of information, the Demand Unit becomes a single indicator for estimating your sales and tracking your sales pipeline.
• The sales pipeline comprises various indicators: the number of opportunities, the scale of the opportunity, the conversion rate, and the speed of sale.
• Activity indicators represent the quantitative indicators relating to the processes established by the company to measure its sales personnel’s commitment: number of emails sent, phone calls, sales meetings, proposals, follow-ups…

Sales organization: which tools does one use?

To maximize your results, it is important to acquire tools dedicated to your sales organization. They enable you to increase your productivity, manage and adjust your projects, and improve your communications to achieve your sales objectives.

KPI, reporting and dashboards

Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are primarily used to measure your sales performance. There are several such indicators: quantitative KPIs (number of appointments, prospecting calls, sales volume…), qualitative (number of complaints, customer satisfaction index…), ratios (customer retention, conversion…).

Reporting is an internal information communication and analysis medium. It renders various data items for a defined upstream period. It contains brief summaries, graphs, and charts.

For daily tracking of results, the dashboard is a very good tool for monitoring your teams. Among other things, it contains the number of contracts signed, conversion rates and much else besides. They enable you to absorb information at a glance and optimize your strategies if sales objectives are not being achieved.

Depending on your sales objectives, you can use a single tool or several tools together. Technologies are available nowadays for bringing all these indicators together.

CRM

CRM is software for optimizing the management of the customer relationship. It contains a database of key customers for optimal monitoring and efficient prospecting, enabling you to increase your turnover.

You can configure your CRM as a function of your sales processes to centralize all data in one place. It is a real time saver for your sales teams, who will find all the information they need in a single tool. They also benefit from practical features such as the automated sending of emails, an alert system, dashboards, a history of customer interactions, exchanges with them… The CRM software is a true support tool for your sales teams.

ERP

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software provides an overview of your indicators and of how the sales process is being managed. It encompasses the customer relationship, administration and finance, and production management. It is frequently possible to combine CRM with ERP. This tool is important before taking strategic decisions or when signing a contract to check stocks, for example.

The ERP tool comprises a consolidated database containing all the company’s information.

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence represents the technologies and applications responsible for collecting sales data, integrating them, analyzing and presenting them in the form of reports. It enables aspects of your company’s data, and of the competition as well, to be analyzed, while adapting to sales objectives.

Other tools

There are numerous other sales organization tools, including:

• Social selling: this is mainly about sales prospecting using social network features (Facebook, LinkedIn…).
• Productivity tools: there are tools for efficiently organizing your day-to-day interaction with your teams: Trello, Evernote, Slack, Asana…
• Email management tools: they enable analysis of email openings using campaign reporting. Your teams then analyze whether it is appropriate to change your email’s content or format (Mailchimp, Sendinblue…).
• Marketing automation: sales campaign automation software products save precious time. They enable you to concentrate on more productive activities.
• Management and matrices techniques: most of them familiar, they optimize your sales management: SMART method, DISC tool, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the Deming wheel, the Eisenhower matrix, or SWOT.

Nomadia offers you numerous solutions targeted at your salesforce for an efficient sales organization. Discover our CRM providing day-to-day support for your sales teams to improve your customer management, and our sector assignment tool for efficiently allocating your teams.

Do not hesitate to contact our experts for a trial demonstration of our tools.