A sales team structure that lets salespeople send difficult buyers back without a review leaves those deals with management or makes clients wait. Suppose that after the rules changed, conversion among accepted enquiries rose from 33.3% to 40%, but of every 100 suitable enquiries, 16 now ended in payment instead of 20. The salespeople’s report shows an improvement; the company has four fewer paid orders.
Our client, a supplier to the food service sector, had already split its salespeople into groups: some looked for new buyers, while others handled existing ones. At a meeting with our head of sales and business development director, the question of large clients came up. Management handled them, and the owner joined difficult negotiations. His explanation was brief: “No one can handle clients like these at the moment.”
The structure was already there. There was no one within it to take over the most important buyers.
Finding buyers and looking after the existing customer base had been divided, but the most difficult deals remained a separate job for management. If you draw only the salespeople’s roles, this part of sales disappears from the chart. It does not disappear from the owner’s working day.
Someone must also take responsibility for difficult deals
The sales team structure must assign responsibility for handling difficult clients, even if the owner conducts some of the negotiations. The owner’s involvement in one decision does not relieve the salesperson of preparing the meeting, continuing the conversation and following through on agreements.
Handing a large buyer to someone who cannot handle the negotiations is a bad way to make the team independent. But between “hand everything over” and “keep doing everything yourself”, there is work that can be divided more precisely.
It is one thing for the owner to approve an exception to the terms. It is another for the owner then to remind the buyer about documents, find out their decision and keep track of the order. In the second case, the owner is already handling the sale. The salesperson brought them in for one decision, but the follow-up stayed with the person who made it.
This gives the owner a specific decision to make. Before creating another group, define what it must see through itself, what difficulties it should seek help with and who handles the client after that help. Otherwise, large buyers will stay with the owner, while new roles appear around simple orders.
Which sales team structure should you choose?
Choose a structure based on differences in the work: separate stages require different skills, products require different knowledge, and territories require a local presence. If a difference changes only the group’s name, there is no reason to split the team because of it.
The basic reporting structure is short: owner or commercial director — head of sales — salespeople. The head of sales must have the authority to assign the person responsible, adjust workloads and deal with disputes over clients. Without this, each new group gets its own reason to turn to the owner.
| Structure | When the split is justified | What must be clear between employees |
|---|---|---|
| Salespeople handle every stage | Salespeople have time to find buyers, negotiate and handle orders | Who takes over a client when the salesperson is absent |
| By stage: finding buyers, selling, ongoing support | There is enough recurring work at each stage | Who is responsible for responding to the buyer until the next employee accepts the handover |
| By buyer group | Large chains and small companies really do buy differently | Where a client goes after growing from one group into another |
| By product | Making a proposal requires different technical knowledge | Who handles a purchase of several products and puts together a combined response |
| By territory | Visits, local contacts or work across different time zones are needed | Who is responsible for a company with divisions in several regions |
Each row has a cost: a new division adds a handover or a need to coordinate. So it is sometimes more useful to give a strong salesperson an assistant to handle paperwork than to take half their negotiations away. The assistant takes on the paperwork; agreements with the buyer remain the salesperson’s responsibility. A large amount of revenue alone does not explain which work needs to be separated.
A separate group for large clients is justified when it has people capable of handling such purchases and a leader who helps them manage. Moving all difficult orders to one top salesperson is also a choice, but the dependence will remain. For an analysis of how the team learns from that person’s work, see “The team are generally capable.” Why the department still depends on one salesperson.
Handing over a client and getting help are different decisions
When a client is handed over, the person responsible for continuing the sale changes. When a specialist gets involved, the original salesperson keeps that responsibility and gets an answer to a specific question.
Suppose an equipment buyer needs a technical calculation. The engineer is responsible for the calculation and its deadline. The salesperson establishes the missing requirements, passes them to the engineer and returns to the buyer with a proposal. If the salesperson stops monitoring the deadline after the engineer is assigned, the company has quietly given the sale to someone it had asked only to do the calculations.
The owner’s involvement should be divided in the same way. The owner joins a discussion of special terms; the salesperson prepares the options, records the decision and continues the deal. The owner does not need to remember whom to call next. Their involvement ends with the decision for which they were needed.
When a client actually moves between groups, more than a phone number is handed over. The handover needs the buyer’s objective, the terms already agreed, the open question, the next step and the promised deadline. The recipient accepts this specific work. Covering for an employee on holiday works the same way: reading the client record is not enough; you need to take on the next action and have time to carry it out.
Who has the right to send a client back?
A salesperson has the right to send back an enquiry that does not meet the requirements agreed in advance, giving a specific reason. The head of sales deals with a lack of time or skill on the recipient’s part: neither makes a suitable buyer unsuitable.
This is where specialisation starts to change whom the company actually sells to. The employee finding buyers is assessed on enquiries handed over, and the salesperson on payments among those accepted. The first benefits from handing over more. The second benefits more from accepting those closer to buying. If difficult buyers can be sent back without a review, the company itself pushes them towards management or leaves them waiting.
It is too early to call this laziness. The employee is protecting the result they have to answer for. The owner wanted to divide tasks and, in doing so, also gave each group the right to choose clients that suit them. That right is usually absent from a chart of job roles; it appears when someone refuses to accept a deal.
The reasons need to be separated. The required product is missing — an error in selection or an issue with what is on offer. The client is suitable, but the salesperson is busy — the workload needs to change. The salesperson does not know how to handle such negotiations — they need help and skills development. Sending an enquiry back with the general note “poor-quality enquiry” mixes all three tasks together and leaves the person in charge with nothing but a dispute between employees.
A short rule is useful for handovers:
Until the client is accepted, the employee handing them over keeps in touch. The recipient confirms acceptance and sets the next action, or points out where the enquiry does not meet the agreed requirements. If there is a dispute, the head of sales assigns someone to respond to the client by the promised deadline. Sending the client back does not cancel a promise already made.
The handover record contains five fields: the client’s objective; agreed terms; unresolved question; action and deadline; employee who accepted the handover and time of acceptance. The last field lets the person in charge see the queue between groups. If it grows every day, the recipients’ workloads need to change: a demand to look for buyers more actively will only lengthen the wait.
Sales team performance measures
Sales team performance measures should show the overall financial result, clients’ progress and losses between employees. To assess the structure, you need revenue, gross profit, conversion across the whole group of enquiries, handover waiting time and the proportion of difficult deals that management continues to handle.
An individual salesperson’s payment rate, without the number of clients sent back, can convince the owner that the new structure is better. Let us calculate how this happens.
Suppose that before the rules changed, the team received 100 suitable enquiries, accepted 60 into negotiations and brought 20 through to payment. After the change, it accepted 40 of the next 100, and 16 paid. For both groups, the usual period from enquiry to payment was allowed to pass; the enquiry source and what was on offer were the same.
| Measure | Before the change | After the change |
|---|---|---|
| Suitable enquiries received | 100 | 100 |
| Accepted into negotiations | 60 | 40 |
| Reached payment | 20 | 16 |
| Payments among accepted enquiries | 20 ÷ 60 × 100% = 33.3% | 16 ÷ 40 × 100% = 40% |
| Payments among all suitable enquiries | 20 ÷ 100 × 100% = 20% | 16 ÷ 100 × 100% = 16% |
The salespeople’s percentage rose. The company received four fewer paid orders. For your own calculation, divide the number of payments by all suitable enquiries in the same group, including those sent back, and multiply by 100%. Then calculate the payment rate among accepted enquiries separately: the difference will show what share of losses the individual measure misses altogether.
Fewer orders alone are not a reason to abandon the new structure: the remaining deals may bring more gross profit. That is why financial figures and the reasons for selection are also needed. The owner has the right to turn down certain orders for financial reasons. But that decision must be made deliberately, before employees start making it through their refusals.
For the person in charge, it is useful to track three figures separately: how many clients are waiting to be accepted, how many have been accepted but have not yet received the promised response, and how many have been sent back for each reason. The owner only needs to see where the queue has grown and what the head of sales has changed. There is no need for the owner to review client records in place of the person in charge.
Large deals must not disappear into the team’s overall results. If management still handles them, they must be shown separately. Otherwise, the money from management’s negotiations will mask the results of a new structure that works only for simpler purchases.
How can you change the structure without reshuffling every deal?
The new allocation of work is best introduced with one group of new enquiries, keeping the same people responsible for existing agreements. That group must include difficult but suitable clients: starting only with those ready to pay will tell you nothing about the team’s ability to handle the rest.
The transition consists of four steps:
- The head of sales describes which recurring delay the split removes: waiting for a calculation, incoming enquiries left unprocessed or missed repeat orders.
- For the selected group, they assign the people responsible, define how handovers are accepted and arrange help with difficult decisions. They separately record what remains the salesperson’s responsibility after the owner’s involvement.
- Before the launch, they record the previous arrangement’s performance measures for comparable enquiries. During the launch, they track enquiries sent back, waiting time and the time salespeople spend coordinating with colleagues.
- After the company’s usual sales period, they compare payments, gross profit and management’s workload. They use these figures to decide whether to expand the structure.
If a sale takes a month, the first five working days show the speed of acceptance and the quality of handovers. The financial result will emerge after the month of observing the selected group is complete. Payments for old orders are not included in this result.
Returning to the previous allocation is reasonable if the chosen split added coordination and failed to remove the delay. Keeping it is reasonable if buyers get answers faster, salespeople manage their share of the work, and difficult deals stop moving entirely to the owner. Employees getting used to the new names alone cannot count as success.
When rules have to be created anew and the owner still resolves every dispute, you need someone who will stay to manage under those rules. At RENTROP, building a sales system is part of “turnkey sales management”: our head of sales draws up a sales plan, sets up the sales funnel, introduces scripts and procedures, organises recruitment and oversight, then continues to lead the sales team.
At the supplier mentioned at the start of the article, the handover of large clients had not yet been agreed at that meeting. Moving them to another group on paper would have meant declaring something solved when the team could not handle it. The structure becomes useful to the owner when a difficult client gets someone responsible for them and the necessary help within the team; until then, the owner remains a separate sales group that simply has not been drawn on the chart.