What does your sales team org structure look like?

I personally think verticalizing a sales org died when COVID hit. If you had a hospitality and tourism vertical - they were bleeding big time when the world was shut down. For larger organizations, it makes sense to have a team specializing in healthcare or fintech for HIPAA and security reasons. I'm a big fan of AEs who can be chameleons and be Swiss army knives for pitching all titles and verticals. I've mostly seen sales orgs internally have teams by employee size. Segmenting by a company's total revenue is usually inaccurate. Zoom Info, Crunchbase or Linkedin can be your single source of truth for employee sizes. Any company under 250 employees will have less red tape for legal, security and procurement. One up market, you need AEs that can keep a pulse alive, engaged and excited for longer sales cycles.

Current Startup:

• Team Composition: At my current startup, I’ve built a small but effective team. We currently have:

  • 2 Sellers

  • 1 Solutions Engineer

  • 1 Customer Success Manager

  • 1 Professional Services Team

• My Role: I serve as the Head of Revenue, overseeing all these functions to ensure alignment and drive growth.

• Future Growth Plans:

  • As we scale, I plan to grow the team to about five or six sellers, potentially adding another Solutions Engineer if capacity demands it.

  • I also envision adding three SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) with one manager, as well as expanding the Customer Success team to three members and the Professional Services team to two.

  • This structure should support a lead generation flow of about 100 leads per quarter, with an Average Selling Price (ASP) just under $30,000.

Previous Experience:

• Mid-Sized Teams: In my previous role at Clari, I managed between 7 and 14 sellers. However, I took on more responsibility when we acquired a business that I was asked to lead, soup-to-nuts. In this case, I had five SDRs under one manager, five direct-market sellers in India with another manager, and five direct-to-market sellers reporting directly to me in North America.

In another role, I served as a General Manager, overseeing four regional managers, each responsible for a team of five sellers.

Team Structuring Philosophy: My experience has taught me the importance of structuring sales teams to fit the company’s size, market focus, and growth stage.

Future Expansion:

• Scaling to Mid-Market and Enterprise:

  • As our business grows, particularly as we scale from 50 to 200 total employees, the sales team structure will evolve.

  • I anticipate segmenting the team further, with dedicated resources for Enterprise accounts (likely two sellers) and a separate team focused on the mid-market and SMB segments operating with a higher velocity approach.

  • This will require close collaboration with the product, engineering, and executive teams to ensure we’re aligned on strategy and execution.

Long-Term Vision:

• Complexity with Scale: I expect that as we continue to grow, the sales team will become increasingly complex. This will involve more specialized roles, additional management layers, and potentially further segmentation to address different market needs.

While answering the "sales team org structure" is easy, it can quickly lead sales leaders and organizations down a constrained, unscalable path requiring frequent restructures that are disruptive and distracting from revenue growth.

Here's what I mean by that. As Sales/Revenue leaders, it often begins with an emergent problem to solve, which oftentimes causes us to look at "structure." Assuming we've landed on the right problem to solve, the natural course for solving tends to start with what structure should we use, followed by slotting people into the structure, then organizing the function each will do within that structure.

This is where scalable growth becomes constrained by the structure. Why? Because it was solved from the wrong starting point. To unlock growth in a scalable way, reverse the natural tendency to start with structure (the easy part) and start with the hardest part – answering "What needs to be done?"

The model or framework is as follows:

• What needs to be done? (Function)
• Who is best suited to do each function? (People)
• How can I best organize my team to accomplish this? (Structure)

Structure comes as a byproduct of answering the upstream questions of the 'WHAT' and the 'WHO' before determining the 'HOW'. When treated as a starting point rather than a byproduct, we're left with the same people perpetuating the same problems in their current functions, just in a different structure.

Last summary comment on this so as not to be overly redundant – 'Structure' will not create the success behaviors nor answer the WHO does WHAT questions. It merely guides what you've already defined...or not defined previously. Defined properly, 'structure' then functions like a water turbine. Done improperly, 'structure' functions more like a dam, which is exactly what we say after a failed restructure..."Damn!"