Structuring your marketing team

The way you structure your sales and marketing team can make a significant difference to the way it performs. The right marketing structure for your business will depend on your business strategy and the markets you operate in.

Sales organisation

Most businesses focus initially on organising their sales team in a way that helps maximise sales, repeat business and customer satisfaction.

If your business sells to a relatively small number of key customers, you may allocate key accounts to different salespeople. Each key account manager takes full responsibility for the relationship with the customer, maintaining regular contact, sorting out any problems with order fulfilment, and so on. By providing customers with a single point of contact, this approach helps ensure high quality customer service.

Sales to lower-value customers are typically organised by market sector (eg types of client or geographical area). Where different types of sales approach are needed, these may be split between different sales teams. For example, a telesales team might work on new lead generation or selling low value products, while the main sales team follows up hot leads and higher value opportunities.

Marketing organisation

In smaller businesses, marketing is often structured as a support service for sales – with all marketing employees reporting to the head of sales. Marketing activities such as advertising are driven by the needs of the sales team to support sales campaigns.

While this approach can work well, marketing strategy can suffer as activities such as market research are given low priority. This risk can be minimised by structuring the business with a combined sales and marketing department. Within this, marketing tasks such as communications (advertising, PR and so on), market research and product management (product development and pricing) sit alongside, rather than within, sales.

Depending on the size of the business and commitment to marketing, one employee may cover several marketing roles. Some tasks are likely to be contracted out to external suppliers.

Performance management

Whatever structure you choose, promoting good communication is vital. Feedback from sales and customer service provides useful marketing information. In turn, market research and competitor intelligence can help your sales team hone their approach. Other roles such as finance also need to be involved: for example, in assessing the impact of discounting. Bringing teams together for regular discussions can help boost co-operation and the flow of information.

While financial targets will be a priority, broader performance management should cover a range of tasks: for example, ensuring that contact management systems are kept up to date and monitoring levels of customer satisfaction.

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