WHEN DOES YOUR COMMERCIAL TEAM NEED A NEW DESIGN?

YOUR TEAM IS GROWING AND NEEDS STRUCTURE.

Your team has been turning over good revenue for years. One year is made by a single large order, the next by that extra push to find new customers. Still, something grates. Why do those large orders look like lucky strikes? Why does your inside sales keep asking for more colleagues while revenue stays flat? Why do you train your salespeople every year and does their way of working stay the same?

It is as though you are tinkering at the margins while the core of how you work has never been touched. The team expanded without anyone drawing up the roles and how they work together. Those roles took shape around whoever signed the employment contract. Nobody ever stepped back to look at everything between brand awareness and customer retention.

Stepping back starts with the question of what your market and your company need from the commercial organisation. From that follows which processes have to exist and who carries them out. Sometimes a role is needed that you do not have today. Just as often it is about processes that need adjusting, or collaboration between departments that has to become explicit.

Once that design is implemented, the customer who shouts loudest no longer decides where your team spends its time. That gives you a commercial engine that can carry your growth ambition.

YOUR MARKET IS SHIFTING, SO YOUR ORGANISATION MUST FOLLOW.

The way customers buy is changing. A new competitor blunts what made you distinctive. A new segment turns out to need a different sales conversation than the one you are used to.

These changes put your current commercial organisation under pressure. You can see that it has to change, but not in which direction. What has to be added, what should be kept, what becomes redundant?

I look at how you work today and go deeper into the change itself. That change shifts the set of parameters that define your current organisation. How those parameters move shows what the new organisation has to look like. From there we draw up which processes and roles you can keep and which ones have to change.

YOU ARE BUILDING A TEAM FROM SCRATCH.

As a founder, you were the sales team, and that had its advantages. You knew your customers, you knew when to call, and you could feel where a conversation was heading. For the growth that comes next, being the only one who sells is a risk.

What has to come is broader than a salesperson. There is acquisition to organise, and at some point someone for your existing customers. Marketing has to happen, in house or through an agency. And what you have been doing all this time is written down nowhere.

That is why it starts with the design. I draw up what work there is, what belongs in house and what can be outsourced, which role comes first and what it decides. Only once that exists do you write the job advert or call an agency.