Sales White Paper: The Growing Sales Organization

The
Growing Sales
Organization
WHITE PAPER

Share this White Paper! Copyright ©TheTAS Group. All rights reserved. 1
THEORIES OF COMPANY
GROWTH CATEGORIZATION
As you might imagine with organizational theory, an
abundance of thinking and frameworks exists to help us
explain the stages of an organization’s growth. William
S. Cottringer, PhD, proposes a model with four stages of
organizational development: Acquaintanceship; Friendship;
Conflict; Union. He also touches on the JohariWindow, a
process for guiding companies through the stages.
The Growing Sales Organization
INTRODUCTION
The vast majority of businesses operating today
has a sales arm, sometimes direct and employed,
sometimes indirect and managed as a distribution
channel, that is responsible for bringing customers on
board and developing relationships with them. In very
small organizations, this sales person may also wear
a number of other hats. In very large organizations,
the selling effort is co-coordinated across regions and
Business Units by a complex, multi-tiered hierarchy of
sales professionals, managers and leaders.
Depending on the nature of the company’s business,
sales organizations are also subject to varying
customer buying processes which they attempt to
mirror with their own sales processes. These might be
transactional in nature, with shorter, quicker and more
predictable processes. They might also be longer,
more drawn out affairs, with multiple stages, multiple
buyers, in some cases involving a fair amount of
uncertainty, intrigue and politics. They might also fall
somewhere in between these two models. It is entirely
possible that companies are subject to more than one
type of sales process, depending on their offerings and
their customers.
While it is possible for a one-person outfit and a
multi-national enterprise to follow the same sales
process and chase the same customer, companies of
different sizes are typically subject to different business
pressures and requirements. As a company grows
and its sales organization develops in parallel, it will
experience these pressures and requirements in its
journey from start-up to industry leviathan.
ThisWhite Paper covers the growing sales
organization. It will touch on research into different
frameworks for explaining company growth phases,
and cover the four ages of the sales organization, the
pressures at work and the initiatives and requirements
for successful business. It will close with an analysis of
how Dealmaker fromTheTAS Group supports each of
the four ages and sustains the organization as it grows
and transitions from age to the next.
As with any of ourWhite Papers, there will be a
big variance in the seniority and experience of
the readership. ThisWhite Paper aims to provide
something for the complete range of requirements,
but if you want to dig deeper or move wider, we urge
you to get in touch with us individually. You can do this
via email to: info@thetasgroup.com.
Another model, dating back to 1972, is the Greiner Curve,
using Greiner’s 6-phase growth model for organizations. Each
phase ends with a particular crisis that in turn precipitates
organizational change to address the next phase, if the
company is to continue growing:

THE FOUR GROWTH AGES
OFTHE SALES ORGANIZATION
For the purposes of thisWhite Paper, we distinguish 4 specific
growth ages for the selling organization. Organizations may
not experience all of these phases in their development, and
the vast majority will at some stage transition from at least
one to another.
THE SOHO –
SMALL OFFICE-HOME OFFICE
The SOHO is often the classic start-up, with the founders
working out of a home or even someone’s garage. It is
also a sole operator or consulting practice, a family-run
business, perhaps even a Mom-and-Pop arrangement,
around for a good few years and with no plans to get
much bigger. Perhaps it is a small business, either serving
the local community with a specialist or niche offering, or
doing business primarily via the Internet or telephone and
distributing its products either via the Internet or from the
same office.
Staff numbers are embryonic, in the region of 1-12 employees.
People with a selling responsibility would be in the region of
1 to 3. Revenues per year would be under around $2.5m. The
working environment is typically very informal, with most
staff wearing multiple hats, in a flat hierarchy. Companies
of this size tend to be more entrepreneurial in nature, very
fast moving and agile, able to change strategy and respond
to new customer demands in a matter of days. All staff
would probably be networked to the one site, with personal
productivity or small business office systems to take care of
the necessary commercial, legal, and regulatory processes.
Sales processes at the SOHO vary considerably, depending
on the nature of the companies’core business. Customers
might also be a combination of consumers and businesses. It
is likely that business drivers for the SOHO would include the
need to maintain positive and stable cash flow, to increase
the number of profitable customers to spread the risk, and to
plan for capital and operational expenditure. There would be
pressure to differentiate their offering from the competition,
and they might have very little leverage with larger customers
or suppliers.
• Phase 1 – Growth through Creativity, ending with a
Leadership Crisis
• Phase 2 – Growth through Direction, ending with an
Autonomy Crisis
• Phase 3 – Growth through Delegation, ending with a
Control Crisis
• Phase 4 – Growth through Co-ordination, ending with
a RedTape Crisis
• Phase 5 – Growth through Collaboration, ending with a
Growth Crisis
• Phase 6 – Growth through Extra-Organizational
Solutions, a 6th phase added by Greiner to his original
5-phase model, where organizations continue to grow
through mergers, acquisitions, and looser partnerships
and networks.
These 2 approaches seem a little too generic for our purposes,
which concern the business-to-business sales organization.
James Fischer proposed the 7 stages of organization growth,
which at first glance is more practical for our analysis:
• Stage 1 – Start-Up, 1-10 employees
• Stage 2 – Ramp-Up, 11-19 employees
• Stage 3 – Delegate, 20-34 employees
• Stage 4 – Professional, 35-57 employees
• Stage 5 – Integration, 58-95 employees
• Stage 6 – Strategic, 96-160 employees
• Stage 7 –Visionary, 161-500 employees
Fischer’s model is closer to helping us frame sales
organizational growth, but is based on a multi-year study
of entrepreneurial companies in SiliconValley, with the
consequence that the upper end of firms analyzed and
profiled is not sufficiently large for our purposes. We need
to come up with better categories of sales organizations
that address the business pressures they face and the
requirements for selling successfully.

or larger businesses, and is starting to appreciate the benefits
of scale in its daily operations, though there will still be single
points of failure in some of the specialist roles. Business
pressures include increased competition and the threat of
more frequent consolidation, and merger and acquisition
activity. There is pressure to perform on a regular, predictable
and periodic basis, to satisfy external investors and
shareholders. There may be regulatory and human resources-
based demands on the firm with a larger workforce to keep
happy. There could be challenges to maintain profitable
distribution channels to complement the direct sales effort,
and small-to-medium businesses need to watch as they grow
that they have a coordinated approach to looking after their
customers, rather than getting‘siloed’in their thinking and
working.
Businesses of this size have a formal sales organization, and
you should see more layering, with front-line sales reps, sales
managers typically looking after teams of 4-10 reps, and
sales leadership with responsibility for the company’s overall
revenue number. Sales calls are more commonplace – and
time-consuming – with the weekly calls to try and get a
sense of how the month or quarter was progressing. The
emphasis is on developing and retaining existing major
accounts, as well as forging new accounts and working with
channel partners to penetrate new markets and regions.
Expect to see some class of contact management system, if
not a full CRM system, in the small-to-medium business. The
marketing department takes on the burden of marketing
communications and demand generation, using dedicated
email marketing and lead management systems, to generate
the right quantity and quality of opportunities for the sales
teams to purse.
There is likely to be some formal acknowledgement that
a defined sales process increases revenues and business
efficiency. Sales training might focus on selling skills from
time to time, and, in more enlightened companies with
appropriate customer buying cycle, on sales methodology
too. Forecasting, performance assessment and business
analysis is probably also done, perhaps using spreadsheets,
the default components of CRM systems, or even specialist
third party systems. Small sales operations, learning and
development or sales training areas within the small-to-
medium business are responsible for product and solution
knowledge, more so than management and coaching.
It is possible, but not probable, that sales people in this size
of organization have embraced Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) systems to manage their customer
interactions. Contacts might be maintained in individual
email programs, and the email program might be used to
send email campaigns out to targeted groups of customers.
There might not be a discrete marketing function, with sales
carrying out their own demand generation and business
development, while also covering any public relations and
media-related activity. Sales processes and sales techniques
could be homegrown, intuitive and inconsistent, rather
than formalized and consistent. It’s likely that a formal sales
methodology is not used, and that investment in sales
training is small or non-existent. Forecasting is often verbal or
back-of-an-envelope-based, and any kind of business analysis
might be minimal. A small amount of mentoring might occur,
but it is hard to imagine an instituted ethos of coaching in the
SOHO.
THE SMALL-TO-MEDIUM BUSINESS
With the small-to-medium business you see the separation
of responsibilities into discrete, specialist functions like sales,
marketing, legal & finance, operations (taking in development
staff in a technology-based business, production staff in a
manufacturing business for example), customer service and
so on. It is normal to expect a preponderance of this size of
firms in heavily fragmented industries, with a great deal of
specialist, boutique providers.
We expect staff numbers in the range of 13-200, of whom
quota-bearing sales people would be in the region of 4 to
39. Revenues would be in the ballpark of $2.5m to $40m.
The entrepreneurial mindset in these companies would still
be important, but companies might have to work harder at
keeping the mindset as the political and coordination skills of
working with other departments become more noticeable. It
is likely that the small-to-medium business will have a number
of sites or offices, spread regionally, nationally or even
internationally. Some sites may take advantage of serviced
offices to mitigate the cost of a physical presence.
You should expect to see slightly more formalized sales
processes in evidence, and companies of this size generally
serve either the consumer or the business-to-business sector.
The small-to-medium company is more capable of allocating
resources to complete for major business against similar-sized

different practices and cultures of other companies in a
constantly shifting M&A environment. Regulatory pressures
may well loom large, along with business continuity and
employment union challenges. The need to show constantly
improving sales performance has already been noted.
Companies may also have to wrestle with the conflicting and
shifting loyalties of partners in the supply chain, as well as a
rapidly changing customer landscape.
With such a large sales force, you see more tiering in the
hierarchy, with pre-sales and sales teams perhaps being
organized along specific product or solutions lines to fully
exploit the range of offerings in the company portfolio. It
becomes increasingly harder to get the entire sales force
together, or even regional sales forces together, to get
everyone aligned to the company vision, direction, and
goals. Account management roles might be split between
teams that look after one global client, individuals who look
after one or a small number of accounts, and those who
have a whole portfolio of smaller clients under their belts.
Emphasis is on getting all the channels to be productive
to help the selling effort, and visibility of the channel’s
activities can become a challenge. The marketing function
may also outsource elements of the marketing mix, such as
telemarketing specialists to fine-tune and filter the sheer
volume of leads being created.
Companies of this size probably have highly integrated
systems, using CRM, Business Intelligence (‘BI’), Enterprise
Resource Planning (‘ERP’) and financial/billing systems which
talk to each other and help address the complexities and
dynamics you would expect to see. Dedicated departments
probably oversee the optimizing of sales processes to cater to
complex buyer processes, as well as the formal training and
reinforcing of sales methodologies and skills to try and sustain
sales performance and quickly bring on new staff in a sales
force where turnover is a constant presence. The company
also may invest in specific sales performance technology
to extend and enhance an over-stretched CRM system that
is trying to satisfy the differing needs of several functional
areas. Underlying data integrity and reliability would be all-
important, given the importance of accurate forecasting and
business planning to the company.
THE MID-TIER COMPANY
The mid-tier company sits between the small-to-medium
business and the large enterprise, but may already consider
itself to be a full-blown enterprise. It might serve a large
national market, or have a multi-national presence with a
handful of offices and a presence in all the world’s major
economic regions. It may have outgrown the notion of
departments and divide its business into separate reporting
divisions, or Business Units, each with their own general
manager and Profit and Loss (‘P&L’) accounts. Some of
these Business Units may be organized by business line
or according to national borders. In some major markets,
the mid-tier company is the engine room of the national
economy, and the major contributor to the country’s gross
domestic output.
The mid-tier company has an employee base of around 200 to
1,000. Of this number, sales people would be in the region of
40-200. We expect companies of this size to turn in revenues
of between $40m and $250m. This size of company is likely
to have a flexible approach to working, with tele-working
and career breaks commonplace, probably as a result of a
diverse workforce and the need to retain key experienced
staff. Enlisting the help of external consultants is the norm, as
is outsourcing non-core operations to third party specialists,
in order to the keep the company as nimble and focused as
possible.
As a fully-fledged commercial entity, you should expect
to see formalized processes and procedures in all parts of
the business, and also the emergence of more specialist
Service Units such as Project Management, Purchasing, and
InformationTechnology. The business is heavily reliant on
large enterprise customers for the majority of its income
and margins. Many of these companies could be publicly
owned and traded, bringing an extra dimension of discipline
to financial dealings, in the form of quarterly earnings
calls, analysts briefings and reporting.The world’s financial
communities expect actual performance to be strictly within
the forecast range, and do not react well to surprises that
deviate from either side of the estimates.
Intense competition is likely to feature strongly as a business
driver, and companies have to work hard to assimilate the

Business pressures and requirements for the enterprise in
many cases can be thought of as an extension of those of the
mid-tier or small enterprise, with international competition,
cultural practices and regulation being especially marked.
With a vast sales force, possibly numbering in the hundreds
in some countries, the emphasis is on trying to standardize
across a common, standardized terminology and best
practice across sales processes, sales methodology and sales
technology. You should expect to see further tiering of the
account management functions amongst the enterprise
customers. A major challenge for firms of this size, with a
matrix approach to their sales force, (perhaps split across both
regions and product lines, or else horizontally across customer
size and vertically by solution) is to get one window on their
addressable market, or on their global customers.
Sales organizations of this maturity may well be on their
second or third generation systems, and the upheaval of
changing the CRM system, for example, is major. With the
need for perhaps the most sophisticated forecasting and
analysis, it is somewhat surprising to note that many firms of
this size do not forecast in their CRM system, resorting instead
to more traditional paper- and spreadsheet-based methods,
using up considerable portions of their reps’and managers’
available selling time in the process.
Expect to see large Service Units established to fulfill the
requirements of their internal customers, the Business
Units. These areas tend to be primarily for overseeing the
deployment of specialist sales technologies to support the
enterprise’s various sales forces. They might hold their own
budgets, but in the main the power and decision-making
rest with the Business Units, as the chief beneficiaries
of these investments. Furthermore, the SalesTraining
function assumes major significance for the enterprise, and
it is common to see large departments of internal trainers
with the responsibility for the overall sales performance
wellbeing of the sales forces. In these cases, firms still adopt
specialist sales methodologies but invest in a‘train the trainer’
approach, preferring that their own people deliver the sales
methodology training, rather than that provided by the
owner of the sales methodology Intellectual Property (IP).
THE ENTERPRISE
The 4th of the 4 growth ages is the Enterprise, the established,
multi-national businesses whose companies and brands
are household names. The top end of this group makes
up the Fortune-type lists and forms the base stocks for the
national economic and exchange indices. The enterprise
has a truly global presence and is often foremost in the
mind of government bureaucrats and policy-makers. They
can exert immensely powerful influence over regional and
national economies and are generally not shy at making their
political feelings known and negotiating preferential trading
conditions when they set up new operations.
The enterprise, for the purposes of thisWhite Paper, has
in excess of 1,000 staff. Of these employees, 200 or more
might be in sales, contributing to annual revenues in excess
of $250m and at the top end higher than the total domestic
product of some countries. This is generally the most mature
type of organization, with strength and depth in all areas, and
also some specialist areas like government lobbying. Highly
complex and tiered in its organization, the enterprise invests
heavily in the legal function, protecting itself against anyone
who might encroach on its patch, patents or processes.
Constantly in the spotlight, the enterprise and its leadership
team are generally subject to widespread admiration and are
often signaled out in articles as examples for other businesses
and students to follow. The CEOs of such organizations are
usually hugely gifted and driven, and are considered the
captains of industry and our general economic wellbeing.
This becomes a somewhat double-edged sword in times of
financial hardship or impropriety.
The enterprise, by virtue of its size, operates according to
highly formalized processes and procedures. Companies of
this size sometimes find it hard to change course and respond
to market changes. Where the SOHO can incorporate
something new in days, this might stretch to weeks in the
small-to-medium business, months in the mid-tier company,
and many months or even years in the enterprise. Customers
of the enterprise will include governments and other large
enterprises, and may be long-standing, formal partner
arrangements with equally large enterprises in the supply
chain, distribution, financial and business consulting areas.

Dealmaker and the Small-to-Medium Business
In the small-to-medium business, it becomes harder to
get a handle on all the activity in the sales organization.
Communication is more difficult, and there are the increasing
challenges of maintaining consistent messaging, sales
language, sales process and culture within the organization.
The notion of ownership of opportunities and accounts
also becomes more important. Dealmaker helps the sales
professional reinforce their individual opportunity and
account management skills on a daily basis. It can also
support a range of permissions and sales hierarchies for day-
to-day management and reporting. Dealmaker is delivered
to the customer preconfigured to their specific business
situation, and the straightforward administration function
helps with ongoing management. Furthermore, a complete
virtual learning and certification system within Dealmaker,
reinforced by expert coaches, removes the need for the entire
sales force to be absent at a physical training workshop.
Dealmaker and the Mid-Tier Company
The mid-tier company is truly connected, not just with its
stakeholders but also within itself, as a range of systems talk to
each other to enable the company to know what’s happening
end-to-end in its business and to compete as effectively as
possible. Dealmaker is 100% native in Salesforce CRM so
businesses can trust the security, performance, and scalability
of Dealmaker to match that of Salesforce itself.Time and
wasted energy wrestling with deal analysis and forecasting
can be a major business pressure on the mid-tier company.
The sales process science in Dealmaker software takes the
guesswork out of analysis and forecasting by removing sales
people’s subjectivity and providing accurate insights into
deal health and deal progression. This is achieved through
objective in-depth analysis of the sales organization’s actual
performance and knowledge of what it takes to close deals.
DEALMAKER ANDTHE
GROWING ORGANIZATION
Dealmaker is a sales performance automation system
designed to help companies to sell smarter and manage their
business better. It is geared to sales organizations that have
a relatively involved selling process, and helps them solve the
problems of revenue shortfall, inconsistent sales effectiveness,
and deal and performance analysis. We serve customers in a
range of industries. Some of our customers have less than 5
sales people, and some have more than 5,000 sales people.
Some of them are looking to train a couple of their new
hires, while others need to establish globally successful sales
academies. Regardless of their size and business pressures,
they use Dealmaker to manage and guide their selling efforts.
Dealmaker is not only the ideal partner for sales organizations
in each of the 4 growth ages, but also a constant partner as
the growing sales organization makes the sometimes painful
transition from one growth age to the next.
Dealmaker and the SOHO
In the small office or home office environment,
communication between and management of a small sales
team is easier.The founder can often be the chief sales
officer, and will be very close to any additional sales people.
Dealmaker is a software-as-a-service offering, and as such has
a low up-front and affordable ongoing investment for the
embryonic sales team. Dealmaker provides full opportunity
management and account planning systems, housing the
sales methodology and sales process best practice. It is
also equipped with full deal analysis, performance analysis,
coaching, deal alerting and virtual learning components.
Since Dealmaker is accessed via theWeb, this also means that
any geographically dispersed team members can also stay
close to opportunity and account management activity, as
well as deal and performance reporting.

TransitioningYour Growth Ages and Growing the
Business with Dealmaker
As companies grow their business, they follow a step-like
graph as their circumstances change and they invest and
prepare for the next phase of their existence, so that they can
reap the benefits of their new size and reach. Sometimes
these step changes in growth can seem more like mini-
chasms, each needing to be successfully negotiated if
the organization is to remain competitive, cash-rich and
profitable. Against this background of major distractions
and shifting business pressures, sales organizations have to
continue selling and keep the business flowing in. They can’t
afford to take a couple months off while things get sorted;
the pressures to bring in revenue, improve performance, and
accurately forecast demand for their products and services,
are relentless.
Dealmaker can help with these transitions. As the sales
organization transitions from SOHO to small-to-medium
business, a major issue is capturing the sales knowledge and
experience of the founding sales people. Dealmaker is the
perfect vehicle for this. For companies moving from small-
to-medium status to mid-tier company, communication
between all members of the wider selling teams becomes
a major pressure, as does the need to bring consistency
and standardization to selling processes and terminology.
Dealmaker provides the glue to make this happen. Mid-tier
companies making the leap to fully-fledged enterprise face
major logistical hurdles aligning large teams that are focused
on one very large opportunity or account. Dealmaker allows
the enterprise to insure its teams are fully engaged and
informed on the activities.
Dealmaker grows naturally as the sales organization grows,
and adding users is straightforward and cost effective.
Furthermore, Dealmaker andTheTAS Group’s change
execution process allows the bourgeoning organization
to bring on, train and ramp up new or merged sales staff
on a continuous basis, to support the constantly changing
workforce.
Dealmaker and the Enterprise
Dealmaker enables all the major engines of a successful sales
organization – sales teams, sales leadership, sales operations
and training – to perform at their maximum level. It is
specifically designed and configured to help sales people to
sell smarter and sales leaders to manage their business better.
Dealmaker is completely configurable to the enterprise’s
business model, and will support the automation of and
reporting on several different sales processes. The platform
also enables the enterprise to see across its entire global
addressable market or global accounts, for account planning
and deal optimization. Dealmaker can easily be extended
beyond the sales organization to all other areas of the
enterprise, to enable non-sales divisions to be better informed
by and better support the activities of the sales organization.
TheTAS Group works with some of the world’s most admired
sales organizations, and from this experience has developed a
successful blueprint for enterprises to build their own world-
class global sales academies and sales performance initiatives.
This blueprint includes the development of a custom‘success
charter’to help the enterprise think about how they will
measure both financial and behavioral benchmarks of success
for their programs. We also guide enterprises through our
proven change execution process, and provide additional
consulting around project management, governance, sales
process optimization, and opportunity and account reviews,
channel management programs, and a range of other
services.

Salesforce PlatformeLearning
Coaching
Methodology
Analytics
IntelligenceKnowledge
Virtual
Learning
Onsite
Workshops
Success
Checkpoints
Customer
Success
Charter
Change
Execution
Process
EDUCATION SERVICES
SUMMARY
Sales organizations come in different sizes and phases of
maturity, which we define as the four growth ages: SOHO,
small business, mid-market, and enterprise. The growing
sales organization is subject to a changing canvas of business
pressures, and as it grows it must define and execute its
evolving requirements in a range of areas, including sales
skills, methodology, process, marketing, management,
coaching, compensation, development, technology,
adoption and reinforcement. As such it is constantly in the
change management business.
The Dealmaker sales performance automation platform
brings together sales methodology and sales process for
sustained and predictable revenue growth. Dealmaker
customers come from all 4 growth ages and Dealmaker is
adept at fulfilling the sales productivity and reinforcement
requirements of companies of all sizes. Dealmaker can also
be a long-term partner for the sales organization as it grows
out of and into the various procedures and technologies that
support the business.
If you wish to find out more aboutTheTAS Group’s sales
performance offerings, or anything else discussed in this
White Paper, please contact us at info@thetasgroup.com.
Recommended further resources:
• TheTAS GroupWhite Paper – Sales Considerations
During Mergers
• TheTAS GroupWhite Paper –When Companies
ComeTogether
• Dealmaker Genius – Generates customized sales
processes in a matter of minutes
• Dealmaker Index - Evaluates your company’s sales
process, as well as your own, so you can see how they
stack up against others.

ABOUTTHETAS GROUP
TheTAS Group helps progressive sales organizations increase their sales velocity resulting in higher win rates, bigger
deals, shorter sales cycles, and more qualified deals in the pipeline. Our unique value is deep methodology embedded
within intelligent Dealmaker software, 100% native in Salesforce. Smart coaching, delivered just-in-time, improves
sales performance and accelerates sales results.We have changed the paradigm of improving sales effectiveness from
traditional sales training to delivering sales methodology and insights when and where the sales person is working a
sales opportunity.
For more information visit www.thetasgroup.com
Copyright ©TheTAS Group. All rights reserved.This briefing is for customer use only and no usage rights are conveyed. Nothing herein may be reproduced in any form without written permission ofTheTAS Group.

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