Building a sales strategy: channels, roles, and performance management

What belongs in a sales strategy?

Four decisions. Everything else is execution and belongs in the annual plan.

• Which customers. Segments with names and boundaries, plus an explicit statement of which inquiries you won't pursue. Without that second half, the first is just an intention.
• Through which channel. Your own field sales, inside sales, partners, distribution, public tenders. The channel follows the order value and how much explaining the product needs.
• With which roles. Who wins new customers, who manages existing accounts, who provides technical support. In mid-sized companies one person often does all three. That's a decision, and it should be named as one.
• How it gets measured. Two metrics ahead of revenue are enough, plus revenue as the outcome.

These four points fit on one page. Anything longer is usually a list of activities, and that goes stale within a quarter.

The link to the corporate strategy is tighter than the separate documents suggest. The corporate strategy says where you want to make money five years from now. The sales strategy says which customers will fund that path over the next twelve months. If the two documents name different segments, sales wins, because sales brings in the orders. That's exactly how strategies quietly fade out without anyone ever abandoning them.

Territories or segments: how do you structure sales?

By segment, as soon as the strategy favors one. By territory, when travel drives the cost and all customers look alike.

The difference matters. In a territory model, every rep covers whatever sits in their region. That's efficient on the calendar and it keeps anyone from getting genuinely good at a segment. After two years, nobody speaks the language of the target industry well enough to hold their own technically in a tender.

A middle path often works better than either: territories for the existing business, plus one person who works the target segment exclusively, regardless of region. That person needs their own targets, because they'll close less in the first months than account management does.

Which roles does a mid-sized sales organization need?

Three tasks that sit poorly in one person. They can still sit in one person, but then with a clear priority.

The first row explains the most common finding: a sales team that hasn't won a new customer in years is rarely a bad team. It's fully booked with existing business, and nobody has decided that new business comes first. The test is simple: look at the calendars from the last four weeks and count the meetings with companies that have never bought from you.

How many target accounts per person are realistic?

Fewer than most target lists suggest. Here's a rough calculation, with assumptions you can check against your own business.

A field sales rep has roughly 200 working days, about 130 of them for customer contact. At two meetings a day, that's 260 meetings. A B2B sale with a mid-range order value takes four to six meetings to reach a decision, plus the account work afterward. That leaves room for roughly 30 to 40 active sales processes a year and an account base of 40 to 60 customers.

A target list with 300 names isn't a list, it's a collection. What works is 30 to 50 prioritized target accounts per person per year, with a fixed monthly slot for maintaining the list. If you don't cut the list, the day's coincidences make the choice for you. When cutting, one hard question per name helps: what do you know about this company that isn't on its website? If you can't answer it, you have an address, not a target account.

What do you steer by before revenue shows it?

Two metrics. More than that creates reporting work without added insight.

• First meetings in the target segment per month. This number shows whether the strategy has made it into the calendar. You can influence it, which is what makes it useful for steering.
• Win rate on proposals, broken out by segment. It shows whether you convince people in the target segment. If the number of proposals goes up and the win rate goes down, sales is working the wrong segment or the offer doesn't fit.

Add two quarterly reviews that don't need an ongoing metric: the reasons for lost proposals and the average discount granted. Both surface problems that won't show up in revenue for another year.

With reasons for losses, the source of the information matters. "Too expensive" is the standard answer and is rarely the whole story, because it's the most convenient one for the buyer. The reason becomes useful when you ask who the customer chose instead and what that provider promised. Two follow-up questions are enough, but someone has to ask them.

What doesn't work: visit counts without a segment reference. They measure effort and can be met without ever reaching a single target customer.

How do you get a new sales strategy into the team?

Through the target list and through compensation. Both are hard signals; everything else is explanation.

The target list is the fastest lever. When every salesperson sets 30 names with their manager at the start of a quarter and that list gets reviewed in the monthly one-on-one, the work shifts within a single quarter. Without that meeting, old habits stay.

Compensation is the second lever, and the less comfortable one. As long as commission is tied to total revenue, an experienced salesperson will sensibly work the existing base. A higher rate for new customers in the target segment costs money in year one and is the only change that reliably works.

That comes with an expectation about time: a shift in customer focus shows up in the numbers after two to four quarters. Reverse course after one quarter and you've taught the team that the next strategy will pass too.

And if you hire new people for it, plan for their ramp-up time. Depending on how much explaining the product needs, a B2B salesperson takes six to twelve months before bringing in deals independently, and during that time they tie up an experienced colleague. Two new hires at once are therefore almost always a step backward in performance in the first year, even if the team has grown on paper.