Sales and Distribution Management
Sales force critical analysis – Final Paper (10/11)
Introduction
Founded in 2008, Devbridge Group is an innovative software design and development
company dealing with Fortune 1000 companies in financial services, manufacturing, and technology.
They turn clients inputs into digital products. Considered as a scale up, composed of more than 400
employees driving a 40% year over year growth since its establishment.
This paper is aiming at giving you a complete overview of Devbridge sales organization and its
underlying components. As well, the level of specialization and size of the salesforce, especially when
addressing different customers in terms of importance. Tackling a company’s sales organization
system implies going deeper into understanding human resources working to achieve long term
financial and organizational sustainability. Being strongly linked to the theoretical content covered in
class, the following main concepts explored will relate to the degree of centralization, specialization,
staff positions, market orientation and effective teams coordination.
My work is organized to focus on the structure of the sales team, a critical analysis of its current
system, potential recommendations and finally develop the limitations facing such an analysis.
Structure of the Sales Team
Devbridge has a tech DNA, relying on a team of product managers, product designers and
engineers working altogether to build technology-driven solutions. Building is a mandatory step but
none product generates value before being released and sold. Evolving in business-to-business
market, its sales team is organized around two customers segments. Both, the major accounts
(strategic clients) meeting pre-defined criteria and the other executive accounts. Here is a schema of
the current structure in place (exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1
Devbridge - Sales Team structure
Articulate in that way it is referring to a horizontal organization where each client is treated
individually, getting an individual support. This structure let the planning team at the core of the
equation with the marketing, product, designing and engineering teams all around working
collaboratively. When building tailor-made products for your customers it is particularly efficient as a
sales model. The main consequences are to remove or at least reduce management supervision,
inefficiency and cost.
Each roles and responsibilities are summarized as follow:
Marketing: responsible for creating brand awareness, generating new leads and closely
following-up accounts for a future possible conversation with hunters
Hunters: act as pure deals intermediaries and are not involved in deals closures
Closers: relaying hunters they will move a deal all along the sales conversion pipeline
Account Executives: having specific industry/client knowledge they will follow an account
throughout its whole lifetime. Their main goal is to retain and grow that account
Senior leadership, engineering, design, R&R and other: supporting the sales process
through their specific core competencies
Describing an organization is not sufficient to accurately assess effectiveness and performance of a
sales organization. This is why it really matters to understand why such a sales model has been
implemented? How is it performing? And, what could be improved?
Critical analysis
Efficiently selling is a repeatable process achieved in a near-perfect way. Its conception is key
but its execution frames whether a business succeeds or fails. The funnel conversion of every sales
strategy can be summarized in 3 steps:
1) Defining the right target customers
2) Converting potential customers into clients
3) Having a strong deals follow-up process to expand customer relationship
Rigorously following those three steps will increase the likelihood of captivating potential customers,
winning a deal, and retaining them on the long-run.
Analyzing data enabled them to define which metrics related to business performance needed to be
followed. As seen below (exhibit 2), they are key to monitor a pipeline, conversion ratio across
different stages and progress to be made before definitively closing.
Exhibit 2
Devbridge - Opportunity stages and probability of close
There are three elements captivating my attention in this sales organization. Here is a more in-depth
analysis of the underlying problem, solution proposed and final outcome produced for each of them:
1st element: developing key strategic accounts
More than the sales teams themselves, optimizing the accounts allocation is a major step.
Problem: attracting clients and generating leads is a first step but properly evaluating which
ones are really value-generating is even more crucial.
Solution: writing a list of criteria aiming to assess a customer level of priority
Outcome: focus on a top 10 accounts accounting for more than >5M$ in annual revenue goal
2nd element: assess the ideal deal size
As every prioritization step, it depends on your business maturity and strategy, refining what kind of
projects you can manage.
Problem: accepting every clients can raise inefficiencies, leading to the loss of high-value
deals
Solution: setting up pre-specified requirements (KPIs) to be able to deal with us. In the
meantime, training hunters to make them better assess clients’ business potential
Outcome: identifying more accurately customer needs. Resulting in a better resource
allocation making the cross-functional teams (horizontal organization) working more
efficiently
3rd element: increasing value through sales process
Getting the highest value from a deal can only be achieved through sales transparency coupled to
constant technical and non-technical supports.
Problem: partially neglecting some of the sales process steps leads to losing deal value
Solution: not waiting for an high-end finished product to show customers the work progress.
Providing them with early versions (alpha/beta) of the final deliverable.
Outcome: allowing to keep the client informed about project advancements. Additionally,
enables collecting instant feedbacks and therefore iterate if changes have to be implemented.
Critically evaluate and interpret those 3 core elements emphasizes the importance of a strong sales
organization. Additionally, that company is facing a Pareto rule where 80% of its business is yielded
by less than 20% of its customers. It points out the relative importance of key accounts and linkage
with how those key accounts are performed, all this in order to maximize clients satisfaction and
company’s ability to create long-term value.
Recommendations
A sales organization figures out business sustainability. Thus, whether you are already operating a
business or planning on launching one, some key elements to be kept top of mind so that increase
likelihood of success:
1) Enhance integration of core teams: leading to more qualified leads by developing cross-
selling strategies and up-selling opportunities. Improving your sales volume and quality.
2) Organizational effectiveness: striving for excellence in delivering and executing a sales
action plan. Can only be achieved through a team’s full alignment and strong top-down
leadership from executives. Sharing vision fosters employees commitment and devotion.
3) Rebalancing go-to-market strategy: assessing the different costs centers and balance efforts
allocation towards more cost efficiency. Remove low or non-value added intermediaries so
that generate higher customer value.
The bottom-line is to aim at increasing the customer experience throughout the full sales funnel, at
each touchpoint.
Limitations
First of all, any cross-industries or companies generalization can be done following that sales
organization analysis. Indeed, two companies evolving in a same industry will not ever follow an
exact same path. There is no one-fits-all strategy.
Depending on the operating country and industry some of the following parameters will affect
differently a sales organization, forcing decision-makers to think of its articulation in order to better
serve your clients. Amidst all, the market forces, technical expertise required and company
development stage have not been covered through my analysis but can have a substantial impact on a
sales organization.
Another key limitation is the changing environment and how to efficiently implement a sales
organization model which is an ongoing and evolving process. It would require a more in-depth
analysis to identify all the parameters, then modeling their impact and providing for each business
model a customized solution for those variable factors.
As a conclusion, raising an open question for further analysis would not only allow to get to
know more about that topic but also going one step forward by anticipating future evolution. Meeting
current requirements is a pre-requisite but also being able to plan ahead of major changes. As the
main vector of growth, only the human capital of a company has power to produce financial
resources. Human and finance capacities are strongly correlated, and sustaining their growth requires
expansion. As the Boston Consulting Group suggests, it pursues a common purpose of equipping
companies for long-term sustainability (Exhibit 3).
Exhibit 3
BCG – Three dimensional sales expansion
I definitely hope that little piece of analysis is going to achieve initial learning objectives. As
an outcome, it provides useful elements in understanding key concepts underlying each sales strategy.
Finally, it emphasized on how choosing the appropriate salesforce fit is a condition of a short/long-
term business success.
References
Leung, C. (2019). Sales and Distribution Management. Slides. Retrieved from
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Devbridge Group (Copyrights 2019). Official website. Retrieved from
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Nisbet, T. (2016, March 14). 7 characteristics of a successful sales organization. Retrieved from
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Boaz, N., Murnane, J., & Nuffer, K. (2010, May). The basics of business-to-business sales success.
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Morton, M., Higgings, M., Wilson, A. & Evans, K. (2005, October 4). Buiding a Successful Sales
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