Sales Compensation Blog

Have you taken the time to really evaluate the job roles in your company? With new sales plans on the horizon, now is the time to define your job roles. Defining the job roles correctly brings clarity to the sales organization. Clarity will help razor focus the sales reps in the right direction.

Signs that you need to look at your job roles:

• Reps are unclear who should be servicing a customer
• Customer sees multiple reps from your company
• Reps are unclear what they should be doing
• Everyone is selling everything to everybody

When a company is young with few sales reps, it is very common to have only one job role. Over time as a company grows and changes without proper monitoring of the job roles they can easily stay blended together. The resulting confusion can hurt revenue, moral and possibly customer relationships.

5 Steps to develop sales roles

1. Align sales roles with customer facing roles
2. Define where the rep should spend their time
3. Evaluate rep control over close of business
4. Identify the product stage
5. Check role alignment with company strategy

A good place to start is to align the sales roles with the customer facing roles in this chart. Are the reps generating leads, closing the sales, managing accounts, etc.? To help you understand the current job roles, assess how your reps are spending their time. Are they developing new business, servicing existing customers, etc.? Is this where you want the reps to spend their time in the future? 

The next thing to look at is the amount of control the rep has over the close of business. Does the rep close the sale or is the rep part of a team that supports the sale? Do they have ownership over the sale or are they in a support role?

Finally look at the product stage. Does the rep sell new products, current products or both?

Clear concise job roles avoid confusion between the sales reps in your organization.

Everyone knows who their target customers is and can focus their attention in the right place.

Now that you have defined the sales roles, step back and look at them together. The job roles must support the company strategy. Make sure that the company is covered and there are no gaps in the organization and people are not stepping on each other. Makana Motivator helps you achieve job role alignment through easy cross plan view analysis.