Maximize Sales Opportunities through a Division of Labor

With the sales function in most companies looking remarkably like production did prior to the industrial revolution we can apply the same division of labor principles to the selling function in order to increase productivity or in this case “sales”. 

The primary duty of a sales person is to convert new opportunities into a sale but most companies do not allow them to perform that duty because salespeople are increasingly expected to perform non-selling activities such as customer service and even fulfillment duties.  By assigning the non-selling activities to other positions in the organization, a sales person will be able to increase performance of their primary duty of converting opportunities into sales. But who in the organization should the non-selling activities be assigned to and how do all of those people and activities work together to increase the number of opportunities for the sales person?  The positions and their respective duties should include:

The Promotions Coordinator is responsible for communicating the product or service offering to targeted prospects in order to generate leads.  What is your company doing to keep the top of the funnel full?

The Sales Coordinator is responsible for ensuring that leads are followed up with by the sales people and that the sales people’s calendars are full at all times with business development meetings.  They are also responsible for communicating the result of those meetings to the departments responsible for fulfillment and ongoing customer service.  At the end of the day, sales people should only be reading what is in the CRM and not entering data.

The Technical Team is responsible for maintaining selling capacity by developing unique offerings to the market, providing marketing materials, automating standardized communications, and monitoring key activities such as business development meetings and conversion of opportunities into sales.

The Salesperson should only be responsible for conducting the business development meetings and converting the opportunities into sales. Additionally, a company may be able to decrease the amount of sales people since non-selling activities can be performed by more administrative and technical skilled staff. 

The number of people dedicated to the above listed positions will vary depending on the size of the company, the amount of products, and the number of opportunities that are being generated by effective marketing but by having the right people in the right positions with the right procedures and the right promotions for the right product, a company will maximize the amount of selling opportunities and can guarantee an increase in their sales.