Chapter 7 Sales Distribution & Segmentation Strategies 1. Bifurcate sales development and account executive responsibilities. Many others, like Aaron Ross, former Salesforce team member and author of Predictable Revenue, have stressed the importance of having account executives focus on selling, and having sales development focus on building pipeline. While your account executives are always going to have some aspect of his or her job focused on pipeline generation, it’s critical that businesses put in place the infrastructure to support your sales organization with pipeline generation efforts. This arrangement ensures that you’re able to focus both on sales execution and market expansion. Without it, you’ll find, like many other businesses, that your growth will stall because your account executives won’t be able to successfully and consistently balance both responsibilities. 2. Understand how your customers buy. Put in place a sales framework that enables you to effectively sell to companies of varying size and complexity. Consider employee count, annual revenue, annual spend, and product interest when deciding how to segment your target markets. 3. Sell directly. For any fast-growing business, ultimately, there’s always going to be a point when you think about how to effectively expand your sales organization beyond your HQ or how to develop distribution capabilities abroad. While there are always going to be shades of gray, I’m a strong proponent of hiring, enabling, and growing a direct sales organization to help teams fully capture the market opportunity. Selling directly will help you: • Build internal account executive talent and future leadership talent. • Drive consistency with your company messaging, positioning, and overall sales/customer success experience. • Create a culture of wildly successful customers who feel connected to your team versus the resellers that are serving them. This helps build brand awareness and will have a positive ripple effect on your business.