Knock Down Your Silos with Sales Pods

Your enterprise software product has made it to market, and it’s gained traction. The sales model you spent so much time refining has paid off…but what comes next? When sales teams spend too much time following the same routine, communication decreases, inefficiency rises, and sales begin to plateau. Chances are that the problem lies not with your personnel or your product, but with your sales model.?

I have worked with a number of sales models, and have witnessed both their power to drive revenue and their tendency to outlast their usefulness. Let’s take a look at two popular sales models—the assembly line and the pod—with an eye to their strengths and weaknesses, and the reasons you might want to switch from one to the other.

The Assembly Line

Henry Ford’s assembly line ushered in the modern age of manufacturing, and it remains a powerful paradigm beyond the manufacturing sector. Sales teams use the assembly line model to assign specific responsibilities to four discrete groups of personnel:

• Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) make first contact with prospects, hoping to establish relationships with them while learning about their needs.
• Account Executives (AEs) seek to close the deal. They contact leads qualified by SDRs, address their concerns, and look for the common ground that leads to sales.
• Solution Engineers (SEs) support AEs with technical information, demos, and guidance on how the company’s products and services can be made to meet a given customer’s needs.
• The Customer Success team (CSMs) focuses on account management and customer service while identifying and pursuing opportunities to upsell existing customers on new or enhanced products and services.

Each of these functions is represented by an entire team of sales personnel. Because each team is responsible for a clearly defined set of activities, their performance can be readily measured with appropriate sales metrics. This makes it easy to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your sales process. The assembly line model is easy to implement, as long as you have enough personnel, and can greatly increase your sale’s team’s operational efficiency. It also scales extremely well, making it a favorite model for startups. Its emphasis on predictability and accountability allow managers to fix weak spots and for sales personnel to deepen specific skills over time.

But it’s not a model for every company. For one thing, the assembly line requires staffing levels that are beyond what many small companies can muster. Its emphasis on specialization can make sales operations more internally efficient while appearing disjoined to customers as they are shunted from one team to the next, diminishing the long-term value of each sale. The same factor can cause excessive siloing, leading a company’s best sales personnel to chase narrow performance metrics rather than contributing all they can to the bigger picture.

The Pod

Pods seek to retain the efficiency of the assembly line in a more customer-centric framework. The four roles common to assembly lines still characterize pods, but each pod contains representatives of each role. In my experience, this makes cross-role communication much easier and, since the pod’s performance is related directly to sales and customer retention, it keeps everyone working toward a common goal.

With increased communication comes a more fertile ground for new ideas, and that factor alone can make the pod model a superior one for companies that have gotten their product lines off the ground. A stagnant sales team is an underperforming one, and pods seldom stagnate. Pods can be generalized, with each pod assigned a more-or-less random group of prospects and clients. Or they can be purpose-oriented, with specific pods devoted to different verticals, geographies, or industries. Here’s a look at how a pod’s orientation can support different types of sales strategies.?

• Account Orientation. For companies who tend to serve larger clients, it typically makes sense to align their sales pods around these clients.
• Territory Orientation. Some products are heavily dependent on specific geographies and it is important to be as close to the client as possible. Manufacturers of such products often organize their sales pods by territory to build the kind of local knowledge necessary to sign and retain customers.
• Product Orientation. Sales personnel often become highly knowledgeable about the products they sell. When sales depend on deep product knowledge, orienting sales pods around that expertise can make sense.
• Vertical or Industry Orientation. Similarly, sales personnel with significant experience across a given vertical, or throughout industry’s supply chain can be extremely effective. This can be an especially useful orientation for companies whose product lines are extensive but still focused on specific industries or verticals.

Pods make this sort of inflection much easier than assembly lines. Pods are essentially mini-assembly lines in which disparate sales roles combine to pursue a common goal. They tend to be more flexible and agile, but at the expense of the kind of intramural competition that brings out the best in some sales teams. Nor are they entirely self-sustaining: I have found that managers of pods must be careful to ensure that their members clearly understand their specific roles and work to build appropriate skills over time.

While I have seen each approach work remarkably well, pods offer a degree of customer-centricity that works especially well for companies facing the challenge of translating early success into a sustainable long-term market presence. That challenge affects more than just sales—it often argues for significant changes in management and even in top-level leadership—and the most effective pods I have known have benefited from a stable management structure and a cohesive long-term strategic vision. With those elements in place, though, they can be the dynamos that drive a young company’s prospects forward.

What do you think? Have you worked in an assembly line sales model, or in a pod? Be sure to share your thoughts below, and happy selling.