Building a sales team in an existing business starts with reviewing paid and unfinished orders: how the company receives money and which decisions depend on the owner. The head of sales then brings together the sales plan, sales funnel, working rules and training, and identifies hiring needs. Changes are introduced with promises to existing customers in mind — otherwise the team will be honouring previous agreements while breaking the new rules.
You cannot start with a clean slate here. If special terms were agreed with a buyer or they were promised that goods would be reserved, that commitment will remain after the new CRM system is launched. Along with the order, the head of sales will have to take on decisions that used to rest solely with the owner.
From the outside, this looks like resistance to change: a salesperson goes to the owner again, although they should now be dealing with the head of sales. But what exactly are they going for? Permission to depart from the rules on a new deal, or an explanation of an old promise that nobody passed on to the head of sales? In the first case, bypassing the head of sales must be stopped. In the second, they need the missing information and the authority to fulfil what has already been agreed.
The same behaviour. Different reasons.
When building a sales team, this is what interests me most: what will happen to an order that does not fit the new rules. If the answer has to come from the owner every time, they will get a department that they still have to manage themselves.
Creating a sales team: what already works before restructuring
Creating a sales team from scratch first requires finding a buyer and getting them to pay for what you offer. In an existing business, the initial task is different: identify a way of selling that the team can repeat and separate it from one-off agreements.
Revenue alone does not show exactly what should be repeated. If an order only went through because the owner personally rescheduled dispatch, approved a special combination of items and agreed payment in instalments, the salesperson achieved the result with the owner's involvement. Giving a new employee only the script from that sale is pointless: it does not contain the decisions that made the buyer agree.
Special terms are not a mistake in themselves. They are needed in large and complex sales. The question is whether the company can distinguish an authorised exception from the owner's required involvement in every order. The owner is entitled to get involved in agreeing a large deal. There is no reason for them to explain an already agreed process to every new employee.
Before restructuring, the head of sales gathers three types of orders: those completed on standard terms, those completed with exceptions and those stalled while awaiting approval. For each group, they need the reason for approaching the head of sales, the decision made and where it is recorded. This provides the basis for choosing the first change. If sales stall while waiting for an engineer's calculation, a new script will not remove the queue for that engineer. If the calculation is ready but the salesperson does not discuss it with the buyer, the queue has nothing to do with it.
The owner needs a conclusion: which recurring delay we will remove first and whose decision this requires. A full inventory of every shortcoming in the department will only delay the start of the work.
How do you move an existing department to a standard process?
The transition starts with one part of the sales process where the cause of delays is known. For that part, the head of sales sets the start date, decides what happens to old orders and sets the rule for new ones; then revises the sales plan and record-keeping, trains people and addresses gaps in daily work.
An old promise stands, but the authority to make a new one changes
A term already agreed with the buyer must be honoured or renegotiated separately with them. A new internal instruction does not, in itself, change the agreement.
Here is a sample transition rule for a company that is ending the practice of freely promising buyers special timescales. Suppose the new process takes effect on 16 November:
- For new orders, the salesperson gives a timescale only after receiving confirmation from the person responsible for fulfilment. The response is saved in the order record.
- For open orders, the head of sales collects the timescales already promised, confirmation of the agreement and the next action. The list is ready before 16 November.
- If an old promise conflicts with what can be delivered, the head of sales reviews the order with the employee responsible. The salesperson goes back to the buyer with a solution before the promised response date.
- A change to the price, the contents of the order or other agreed commercial terms receives approval from the person the owner has authorised to give it.
- A special timescale applies to the specified order. It does not automatically carry over to the next purchase: the salesperson obtains confirmation of fulfilment again.
The last point is easily missed. An existing customer returns, and the salesperson offers the previous timescale out of habit. Then they refer to the earlier approval. The company seems to be protecting its relationship with a regular buyer, but in practice every new order prolongs the old process.
Simply demanding that the team follow the procedure is pointless here. You need to decide whether the concession applies to all the customer's purchases or only to the one already accepted. If it continues to apply, it is a permanent term of doing business with that customer and must be included in workload and sales calculations. If it does not, the head of sales prepares the salesperson for the conversation about the next order. The company's silence leaves that choice to the salesperson.
The sales plan needs to be recalculated for the terms we now sell on
The sales plan is built from the required number of paid orders, the average payment amount, the proportion of enquiries that lead to purchases and the time it takes to complete a deal. After the terms change, the previous proportion of purchases needs particular attention: it was achieved with a different offer.
Suppose the monthly target is 10 million ₽ and the average payment per order is 250 thousand ₽. Divide the target by the average payment: 40 orders are needed. In a completed group of 80 suitable enquiries, 20 led to payment — the proportion of purchases is 25%. At that proportion, 40 orders will require 160 enquiries.
Now it turns out that some of those 20 buyers received special timescales that the company no longer agrees to. Using the full 25% in the new sales plan without examining it is risky. The head of sales counts purchases on standard terms and purchases with exceptions separately. The owner sees what share of the result will have to be repeated with a different offer.
A second calculation is useful for assessing the workload. Suppose that, under the new terms, every 100 suitable enquiries produce 20 purchases. Then the same 40 orders require 200 enquiries: 40 ÷ 0.20. The difference from the first scenario is 40 additional enquiries. Who will provide them, and who will handle them? Until there is an answer, the unchanged sales plan amount hides a new need for work.
The calendar still needs to allow for these timescales, too. If it takes 45 days from enquiry to payment, today's new enquiries will not make up a cash shortfall in ten days. For payments due soon, the head of sales reviews orders that are already open; the new flow of enquiries provides for later periods.
Building the department has another cost: the team's time. Suppose five salespeople spend two hours in training: that is ten hours previously spent with customers. Someone needs to be on duty during the session, or training needs to take place in groups. Scheduling a meeting for everyone while keeping each person's previous call volume means creating overdue tasks in advance, which will later appear in the report as poor discipline.
The sales funnel must preserve the history, not the previous inaccuracies
When stages change, a deal is moved on the basis of a confirmed decision by the buyer. An action by the salesperson — for example, sending a proposal — is not, in itself, grounds for treating the terms as agreed.
Suppose that before restructuring, the “Agreed” column contained 30 proposals. After checking, 12 have confirmation from the buyer; the other 18 have only been sent. The department did not lose 18 customers when the records were moved. The head of sales stopped treating their agreement as received.
But those 18 proposals now involve work: contact the buyer, discuss the calculation and get a decision. If you simply move the records and turn to new enquiries, accurate records will have no follow-up. The head of sales assigns these conversations and includes them in the team's workload. Old data errors also require working hours once they have been corrected.
The owner gets an explanation of the change in the report: which orders moved to another stage because a record was clarified, which actually progressed and which were lost. There is no reason to bring back the old sales funnel for the sake of a pleasing number. But an actual refusal following a missed call cannot be blamed on the restructuring either.
Hiring and bonuses must support the chosen way of selling
A new employee is introduced to a process that the head of sales can already demonstrate on an active order. Otherwise, the new employee will encounter several versions of the rules and choose the one that gets them approval fastest.
That is why training does not end with a demonstration of the CRM. The head of sales takes the salesperson through what to do when a buyer makes a special request, where to get a decision and how to tell the buyer when to expect a response. Then they check whether the employee applies this process to their own deal. If the required confirmation is missing, they find out whether the salesperson failed to request it or someone else involved did not respond. Dismissal for the second reason will merely pass the delay on to the next candidate.
How a new employee picks up the department's actual habits is covered in a separate analysis of hiring a salesperson into an unprepared team.
Incentives also need to be checked against the new work. If a salesperson is paid only for a signed contract but is then required to agree how the order will be fulfilled and obtain payment after signing, the head of sales is leaving some necessary actions unrewarded. Before changing responsibilities, decide who takes the order through to payment and how their work counts towards their bonus. Otherwise, the procedure will demand one thing while the employee's earnings depend on another.
Who reviews deals that do not fit the rules?
The current head of sales must review these deals: help the salesperson make a decision, remove the delay and extend the rule if a gap is found. This work starts on the first day of the transition and continues after it ends.
Look, the same question from a salesperson can have different causes. They have forgotten an established process — training and checks on whether it is followed are needed. The process sends them for confirmation to someone who does not respond — the head of sales needs to reach an agreement with that person. The instructions do not cover this situation at all — a decision must be made and added. The demand to “read more carefully” works only in the first situation.
This becomes clear with the next similar order. The employee got an answer through the prescribed route, fulfilled the promise to the buyer, and nobody sought out the owner for another approval. If the same question reached the owner again, an individual deal was saved, but the department's work has not yet changed.
That is why, when choosing who will build the department, I am interested in who will stay after the documents are prepared. A consultant is entitled to finish work once the agreed result is delivered. Your head of sales then takes responsibility for applying the rules and dealing with new exceptions, with time and authority allocated to this. If there is no such person, daily management will be handed back to the owner along with the documents.
At RENTROP, building a sales system is part of our “turnkey sales management” product: our head of sales puts the sales plan, sales funnel, scripts, procedures, hiring and monitoring in place in three months and continues to manage the department using them.
Restructuring does not end on the day the last old order disappears. A regular buyer will return for their next order, and the department will have to fulfil it under the standard process or agree an exception in a way that does not once again require the owner's personal memory. It is this next purchase that the new system must be able to handle on its own.