Separate The Four Core Sales Functions Building a highly productive, modern sales organization requires increasing specialization,and frankly, it's a big reason Salesforce.com has such an amazingly productive and successful sales organization. One of the biggest productivity killers is lumping a mix of different responsibilities (such as raw web lead qualification, cold prospecting, closing, and account management) into one general "sales" role. Inefficiencies Created By “Lumping” Lack of Focus: Salespeople juggle too many responsibilities, reducing their ability to get things done. Salespeople have a reputation for being ADD— how does adding more responsibilities help that? For example, qualifying web leads is a much lower value distraction for salespeople than managing current clients. And managing a large current client base is a distraction from closing new clients! Harder To Develop Talent: When you only have one or two sales roles, it's more challenging to bring in raw talent and develop them. There’s no progressive step-by-step career path. This is unfortunate, because homegrown talent usually ends up being the best! Unclear Metrics: It's harder to break out and keep track of key metrics (inbound leads, qualification and conversion rates, customer success rates...) if all the functions are lumped into single areas. Different roles = easier to break out different steps in your processes = better metrics. Less Visibility Into Problems: When things aren't working, lumped responsibilities obscure what's happening and make it more difficult to isolate and fix issues with accountable follow through. The Four Core Sales Functions (Or “Themes”) Here are four basic sales functions or themes (I say “themes” because each of these functions can be sub-divided even further as your organization gets bigger):