When Growth Needed More Than a Sales Target

Understanding where growth now had to come from

The strategy was still simple: grow. But the way growth had to be created was no longer simple.

The established business needed to be protected and expanded. That meant going deeper into existing accounts, increasing share of wallet, strengthening account management and becoming more consultative as customer buying behaviour changed.

A second growth engine depended increasingly on new products and new markets. That required a very different commercial motion: finding prospects, opening relationships, creating demand, developing opportunities and converting them quickly.

And some opportunities sat somewhere between the two. An existing customer buying an unfamiliar product was not automatically a farming opportunity. The relationship may already have existed. The demand did not.

So one growth strategy was asking the organization to execute different commercial models at the same time.

The same process did not always mean the same work

The Sales Force already had familiar activities. Customer visits. Prospecting. Account management. Marketing. Quotation. Follow-up.

But the name of an activity says very little about the capability it creates. A customer visit designed to deepen an established account is not the same work as a customer visit intended to create demand for a new product. A quotation generated from established demand is not the same commercial event as a quotation created after developing a new opportunity.

So we assessed the sales processes against the capabilities each growth model required: speed, customer centricity, clarity, account penetration, market development, opportunity creation and conversion.

The process architecture began to separate according to the business model it was serving. Not because the activity names were different. Because their purposes were.

Designing one Sales organization for different growth models

The next question was organizational. How could one Sales Force support these different ways of growing without creating two disconnected organizations?

We redesigned the operating model around the work: field roles, account roles, new-business roles, sales support, marketing, the relationships between them and the interfaces with the rest of the company.

The design had to work at the company's current scale, while remaining capable of expanding or contracting as the relative importance of the different growth models changed.

The aim was not to create a permanent structural answer. It was to create an organization capable of adapting with the business.

Before asking who was needed, we defined what was needed

At this point the original HR question returned, and now it could be answered properly. An HR Manager was recruited and became part of the transformation.

The existing Sales Force was assessed against the requirements of the newly designed roles. Most remained in Account Executive and Account Management positions, where their experience and strengths continued to create value. One internal employee showed strong leadership potential and hunting characteristics, and was promoted into a Sales Manager role responsible for New Business Acquisition. Where the required hunting capability did not exist internally, HR recruited externally.

ALIGN developed the new and the relevant existing salespeople in the hunting capabilities the new model required.

The question was no longer whether these were good salespeople. It was whether the right capabilities were in the right roles for the work the strategy now required.

Performance had to follow the design

The organization was then supported with a performance management system built around the different objectives of the roles. Not simply performance evaluation. Performance management: what needed to happen, what progress looked like, and what different commercial roles were accountable for producing.

Only then did the commission system return to the table. Different roles serving different growth models could not sensibly be rewarded as though they were doing identical work. Commission objectives were differentiated, and fixed and variable compensation mixes were adjusted according to role requirements — while total compensation remained aligned across the organization.

The reward system now followed the commercial design rather than trying to compensate for its absence.

Building the ability to keep changing

The final part of the work was not another organizational chart. It was capability transfer.

As the business changed again, the company would need to recognize new requirements, redefine roles and capabilities, develop people, recruit where necessary and adapt. So a second internal capability was created: an L&D Manager was introduced, and together we built what the company called its Corporate Sales Academy.

Its purpose went beyond training delivery. It became part of a repeatable internal engine — change, define, identify new requirements, explain, develop or recruit, adapt.

The aim was simple. Not to make ALIGN permanently necessary, but to help the organization become capable of carrying the work forward itself.