B2B sales focus on selling to corporate clients by finding a solid solution that enhances their ability to generate income. Therefore, your sales team must act as industry specialists equipped with the information, expertise, and framework to ensure that customers receive smooth guidance throughout every phase of their journey with your company.
Hopefully, this article will help you understand how to make a good B2B sales unit that closes deals and keeps customers happy.
Is Your Sales Team Underperforming?
Before we explore ways to organize your team, it’s essential to determine whether they are thriving or not meeting expectations. Let’s begin by examining specific indicators that suggest your closers are not performing at their best.
Low Close Rates? Your Strategy Might Need a Major Overhaul
Are your representatives struggling to finalize deals and generate sales? How does their performance measure up against other companies in your sector or other teams within your organization?
As per Ebsta’s 2024 B2B Sales Benchmark, an average of 69% of sales representatives are falling short of their quotas, even though those percentages are an improvement when compared to what they were last year.
When Product Knowledge Isn’t Just Nice to Have — It’s a Dealbreaker
Unlike B2C deals, B2B sales have a range of characteristics that place demands on your team that require full knowledge of your products as well as of the overall industry. No matter the appeal your product may have, no matter how much it would benefit your customers and generate profit for them–if your team is not able to tell a prospect how your solution can benefit their endeavor, then they do not have the necessary skill set to make revenue for you.
No Repeat Business? Your Sales Pitch Might Be the Problem
Do you have personnel who do not know how to retain a lead on a successful conversion? There are one or two reasons for this. Subscription cancellations and a lack of repeat purchases suggest that there may be an issue with your pitching tactics. So, how do you fix this? Read on to learn what highly effective salespeople look like.
What High-Performing Closers Actually Look Like
The characteristics listed below indicate a successful sales team.
Know the Customer, Win the Deal
A great sales team understands what your customers need to run their businesses and has the product knowledge to help solve your consumers’ problems.
Pitching in Sync: Why Alignment Across Your Team Matters
Communicate regularly to keep your employees aligned. Teams work best when they receive clear guidance. But for true alignment, your staff must understand and trust your intentions, and they must be committed to both your success and the team’s goals. Explaining the reasons behind decisions helps build this understanding.
This synchronization is essential for reaching your goals and moving your organization forward, but leaders must actively work to create it.
Selling with Empathy: The New Competitive Advantage
This is the end of the era of aggressive selling. Customers today expect to be heard and understood. The best sales team serves the customer in person, keeping their needs and experience in focus. When a client encounters an issue, you want your brand to be their go-to source for a resolution.
How to Restructure for Sales Success
After assessing your closers’ strengths and weaknesses, what steps can you take to reorganize for better performance and exceptional results?
How to Set Your Business on the Right Course
The selection process for your B2B sales team structure depends on your product requirements, company size, and chosen business model. Companies should evaluate the following three primary organizational structures:
Island structure
Under this standard business arrangement, a B2B sales team works with a manager who supervises different independent representatives. The sales agent takes full responsibility for product qualification and customer service tasks, as well as order processing functions. Here are the pros and cons of this approach:
Advantages:
It’s simple to execute.
Each sales representative maintains their self-management because the structure needs minimal oversight.
Your agents create authentic customer relationships due to the personal interactions they engage in with their clients.
Disadvantages:
Obtaining the necessary feedback or comprehensive metrics to supervise your sales team might prove challenging.
Managers often find it hard to oversee the representation of the business, given that staff works more autonomously.
Customers who are loyal to representatives instead of your company risk disruptions when team members transition to a new business, especially when they refer their clients to competitors.
Assembly line
The assembly line method proves to be an effective solution because different team members handle distinct operations in the sales process. Here is an example of a simple sales arrangement that includes at least three sequences:
The lead generation team creates leads and acquires necessary information.
Sales development representatives are responsible for making initial contact with prospects through lead qualification to understand their demands.
Account executives focus on delivering demonstrations, addressing objections, and finalizing deals.
The customer service team manages accounts while performing client administration duties and order acquisition.
This model provides an ideal approach to configure B2B sales teams within organizations that pursue rapid sales expansion.
Advantages:
Dividing teams based on their specialties makes them more effective.
The results can easily be quantified in key metrics.
Remote selling increases the feasibility of having individual team members alternate with each other.
This structure makes it easier to find flaws in the funnel.
Disadvantages:
It is difficult to duplicate the framework in small organizations.
Makes the experience less personal for the clients.
As a result, it becomes harder to design a smooth transition from one stage to another.
Pod structure
A sales pod is a small, cross-functional team made up of sales, marketing, and customer success specialists who work together to attract, convert, and retain a specific customer segment. Instead of operating in silos, each pod focuses on one audience, delivering a seamless, customer-centric experience across the entire buyer journey. It is well suited to companies with complex products and long sales cycles.
Advantages:
Creates a seamless customer experience by aligning goals across sales, marketing, and customer success.
Eliminates internal competition and silos by uniting teams under shared KPIs and objectives.
Builds deep expertise by allowing pod members to focus on a single audience or market segment.
Establishes powerful feedback loops that drive continuous improvement and knowledge sharing.
Enables scalable testing and innovation by comparing strategies across different pods.
Disadvantages:
Limits the chances for individual employees to progress and develop.
The accentuated competition might reduce the sense of complacency among staff.
Moreover, pod members lack specialization compared to the assembly line model, so they are less efficient.
Recalibrate Goals for Maximum Impact
Regularly check your objectives. The roadmap this guide offers will be helpful only if you know where you want to go. Before you start reevaluating the results of your closers, it is vital that you consider problems that may arise outside of your sales team. For example, does your production team have the capacity to fulfill a bigger customer base, resolve any supply chain concerns, or address this issue? These questions may also influence how you organize your staff. Once you have the structure and the goals, you can begin guiding your people toward desired outcomes.
Hire the Right Talent for Your B2B Sales Team
After designing the ideal B2B sales team structure, you want to check whether your organiztion lacks any specializations. Then you apply that requirement to the hiring process. You can use Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to ensure you find people with the necessary skill sets to do the job.
Fuel Growth with Ongoing Training
The main advantage of reorganizing your team is that it can open up new avenues for growth and development. For one, it establishes a learning culture and stimulates representatives to venture out of the roles they currently are playing. This helps reduce departmental silos by bringing together team members who understand the challenges others face.
Align Sales and Marketing for Client Success
Creating or reshaping dedicated B2B sales team structures will further break down the walls between sales and marketing teams that you have already made. If the products of both departments contradict, your credibility could decrease, and your customers may be confused. To tackle this, hold regular meetings between the two departments. Consider holding open forums where colleagues can share ideas. This will help create an open atmosphere for exchanging thoughts.
Empower Your Staff with CRM and Sales Tools
As B2B sales teams become more complex, technology plays a crucial role in ensuring that every staff member has access to the information necessary to provide a smooth customer experience. The cornerstone of this is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
CRMs serve a purpose beyond merely storing customer data. They guarantee that every team member has immediate access to essential information during all customer interactions, including names, addresses, order details, transaction histories, and notes related to any previous interactions or issues clients may have encountered with your business.
There are additional integrations, such as linking CRM to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems to streamline and boost call efficiency while providing an easy setting for remote work. This also allows your representatives to access information easily and integrate with an Applicant Tracking System and contact management tools, thereby ensuring that every aspect of your operations is linked together.
Measure Success Through Performance Management and Adaptability
Once your structures and agents are in place, it’s important to keep track of their performance and stay responsive to emerging data. Teams evolve, technology advances, and both markets and customers shift. Key performance indicators (KPIs) will help you learn whether or not you or your teams can be flexible to new situations and adjust to any changes that may come along. You’d also want to consider other new tools like AI for recruitment, just to improve your hiring strategy for the future sales team.
Conclusion
Are your closers functioning at their best, or are there indications of underachievement? If that’s the case, you might have to reevaluate the organization of your sales teams. Selecting the appropriate B2B marketing and sales structure for your company can enhance efficiency, making sure you maximize the potential of your representatives.
