How to Optimize Your Sales Team Structure to Drive Growth

7 Steps to Optimize Your Sales Team Structure

Once you’ve realized your sales team structure needs updating to meet new market demands, it’s time to dive into the practical steps to make it happen.

Step 1: Clarify Your Buyer Journey

You can't create an effective organizational structure without a clear sense of what you're aiming for. Are you looking to grow your existing accounts? Want to launch new products? Hoping to enter new territories?

Understand where your revenue is coming from today—and where it will come from tomorrow.

Equally important is knowing your buyer journey. Once you’ve mapped that out, you can shape your sales process and team structure around it.

Segment your buyers based on their journey and how they want to buy. Different customer groups move through the buying journey in different ways and have their own requirements.

Structuring your sales team to align with these differences ensures a smoother, more effective sales process.

For example, a healthcare client dealing with strict regulations might need a dedicated team with deep industry knowledge, while a lower-value or transactional customer may suit more automated systems.

Step 2: Identify Easy Efficiency Wins

The next step is to audit your current organizational structure to identify the gaps.

“You really need to get to the granular level of what tasks people in your team are performing and what tasks they’ll need to perform going forward.”
Purbita Banerjee, Head of Product Development, Korn Ferry Digital & RPO

Why does the detail matter?

Because AI is transforming the way sales teams function. Ignore it, and your efficiency and productivity will suffer compared to your competitors.

Now determine which tasks might be handled more quickly or easily with AI tools versus those that really need human interaction.

Prospecting, for example, can almost entirely be done using AI-powered autonomous agents.

These bots analyze market trends, organizational changes (e.g., leadership shifts, product launches, earnings reports), and key trigger points to identify potential buyers at the right moment.

In large and complex B2B sales, on the other hand, relationship building is key. While AI tools can play a part in the process, such as creating engaging emails, human interaction remains essential to closing these deals.

Step 3: Assess Your Talent

Once you’ve established where the gaps are in your sales structure, you can assess the talent you currently have in your team against the tasks that need to be done.

From there, you can see if everyone is in the right place, helping you pinpoint opportunities for people to move to more suitable, effective roles, or the need to hire new people.

Talent assessment isn’t just about job titles. It’s about identifying people’s skills and seeing where they best fit in the team.

Keep your primary focus on soft skills and behavioral competencies because they play such a crucial role in team success.

“Hard skills and product knowledge are table stakes. AI tools can assist with this, helping you augment knowledge quickly. You need to assess people’s mindsets and competencies to figure out who can go into which types of roles within the organization.”
Purbita Banerjee

Step 4: Be Clear About Your Culture

Korn Ferry’s World's Most Admired Companies (WMAC) research found that two-thirds of senior executives attribute 30% or more of their company’s market value to culture, while one-third attributed 50% or even more.

Defining your culture is essential for optimizing your sales team structure, as it sets the tone for how your team operates and collaborates.

Culture starts at the top. As CRO, you and your leadership team must define and communicate your mission and values.

You'll also need to decide what kind of organization you want to be. For example, hierarchical or flat, sales-led or product-led. When you get this right, your sales team will know exactly how to stay focused on the bigger picture and drive growth.

Step 5: Invest in Your Managers

“Sales managers are the multiplier effect in your organization. You have really high performers and want to multiply that effect? The sales manager is your multiplier.”
Purbita Banerjee

Managers are the critical link between leadership and sellers in the field. While leaders set the vision, managers are responsible for implementing it.

Their main role is to amplify the capabilities of top-performing salespeople. Without good managers, teams can’t reach their full potential.

That’s why investing in your frontline managers is crucial. They’re the driving force behind your organizational success and the key to making your structure truly work.

Help your managers focus on:

• Coaching
  Good managers actively coach reps to improve performance. In his experience with coaches, Tepper has found that reps who receive regular coaching are more likely to generate higher revenue, with even just a few hours of guidance each month making a noticeable impact.
• Protecting their team
  Effective managers filter out unnecessary noise from the wider organization, allowing sellers to focus on their job.
• Keeping top talent
  Sales reps are more likely to leave when they feel unsupported or undervalued by their manager, Tepper says, based on his work with coaches.

How AI Is Supporting Frontline Managers

In the past, managers had to shadow team members and attend client meetings to provide feedback. Today, AI tools are transforming their roles by delivering real-time analytics and actionable recommendations based on real-world data.

AI helps managers:

• Become better coaches by offering personalized insights
• Identify critical skill gaps across the sales process
• Improve forecasting with data-driven predictions

Step 6: Facilitate Internal Networking

A strong external network is key for sellers, but an equally strong internal network gives them the edge. The best reps don’t just collaborate widely. They know exactly who to turn to for support.

One way to encourage this is through pods—small, cross-functional groups that work together on a specific customer segment, territory, or stage of the sales cycle.

A pod might include Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), Account Executives (AEs), Customer Services Managers (CSMs), and solution consultants, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

But internal networking shouldn't stop there.

Encourage sellers to collaborate with other relevant functions in the business, such as product, marketing, and other key teams. When they have their go-to teams, they can move faster and close deals quicker.

“With one client, it looked at first like the high performers were less collaborative than the low performers. But when we looked again, this wasn’t the case at all. High performers were just good at building their go-to teams and highly focusing their collaboration. Low performers were collaborating with everyone because they didn’t know who to go to, so their sales cycles were longer.”
Sam Tepper

Here are three ways leaders can facilitate cross-function networking:

1. Set expectations
   Reinforce that internal networking isn’t optional but a key part of the sales process
2. Facilitate structured meetups
   These could be learning sessions or regular cross-function check-ins
3. Leverage sales kick-offs
   Include networking sessions rather than just using these events as learning/training opportunities

Step 7: Formalize Training

94% of top sales organizations said that sales coaching improved their sellers’ performance. On top of increased revenue, higher win rates, and more quota attainment, coaching can also help keep reps feeling engaged and happy in their jobs.

Formalizing training is crucial to a successful sales organization structure. It means every team member is on the same page and working towards the same goal.

Training needs to be clearly defined and structured. If it’s not, it won’t be effective. It needs to be consistent so that everyone—from reps to account managers, new starters to veterans—is speaking the same language and following the same processes. This leads to a better customer experience.

Training programs are also crucial for staff retention. When team members feel managers are invested in their development, they’re often more engaged and loyal to the company.

3 Takeaways for CROs

Being strategic about your sales team structure is vital if you want to leverage the skills and potential of your existing and future workforce and drive revenue growth.

Here’s a recap of the key steps to building an effective sales team structure:

1. Define your short- and long-term goals
   Understand where your revenue is coming from today and where it will come from in the future. Having a clear understanding of your long-term vision will help guide your strategy.
2. Tailor your team structure to fit your customer's buying process
   Whether it’s prospecting, nurturing, closing deals, or post-sale support, think about what each stage demands from your team. And determine how AI sales tools can enhance the experience for a seamless customer experience.
3. Upskill your team with coaching and training
   Set achievable goals. Be clear about your values. And provide ongoing coaching to help them succeed.