Benefits of Sales Specialists

Overlay Sales, Co-prime, Specialist Reps as the name suggest are Sales Specialist for a product, domain or niche solutions, ideally having deep knowledge and industry experience in whatever they specialise in.

Usually sales specialists are the result of acquisitions, when a company makes a strategic acquisition to obtain new technology, it may convert the acquired sales force into an overlay team supporting the larger field sales team or as products and solutions become more complex and as they broaden, it is difficult for the account or territory managers to have deep knowledge in all the solution.

> The reason Sales Specialist(hunters) function exist is that they increase the ability of the account/territory reps(farmers) to be successful in presenting solutions to the customer, account/territory rep’s maximise the ability of the sales specialist by identifying and engaging them in the right deals and helping them navigate the customer’s organisation.  Without each other, neither would be successful. 

But when do you need a Sales Specialist ? How long should you have the team for ? How many reps ? are all critical questions before you deploy Sales Specialist.

> Deploy too many and you’ll get buried by problem of double bubble(double comp), have too few and you run the risk of not enough focus on the new, high margin product, which augments much larger deals, leaving larger opportunities overlooked and leave money on the table.

> The question begins with the complexity of the product and the what’s company's sales process. Sales specialists play an important role in situations where teaming is required to bring the necessary strength of knowledge + support to the sale. When deployed correctly, sales specialists can more than pay for themselves.

> However, in some cases sales specialists should be deployed temporarily, the team should be there till the time the products are niche, new and ideally should be absorbed into the larger teams when it becomes generic and if everyone in field is equipped to push it.

> The Specialist reps goal should be to work themselves out of a job by training both the larger field sales force, partners and customers on the new offerings. The lifespan of a sales specialist can be as short as 18 Months to 2 year(min) to max 3 to 5 years, although some specialists might stay on far longer if they continue to evolve, shifting their focus over time to newer and upgraded products and solutions.

> Collaboration is super critical for driving sales performance in the future and Sales Specialist(Co-prime/Overlay) teams are just one of the examples of collaboration, with common goal of maximising organisation’s impact and revenue growth and ability to create value for its customers.

 Happy Selling !!

Cheers, Atul?