When a company wants to increase sales, one of the first questions that arises is about people. Do we need more sales reps? Is the current team large enough? Do we need to change the way we work, our goals, or the bonus system? This is a natural way of thinking, especially when sales are one of the main drivers of company growth. The problem is that before we start designing the work of sales reps, it is worth answering a much earlier question: how exactly should sales be generated in this organization?
Sales are not just the result of a sales rep’s work
It is easy to reduce sales to a simple picture. There is a product, there is a customer, and there is a sales rep who closes the deal. If the results are too low, we look for the cause in the rep’s work. Maybe they aren’t making enough calls, maybe they can’t handle conversations well, maybe they need better training, or maybe we simply need a larger team.
However, this way of looking at things ignores a large part of what actually impacts the outcome.
A sales rep might be doing their job exceptionally well, yet sales might still grow slower than the organization expects. The problem may lie in the types of customers the company reaches, the offer itself, how it is presented, the purchasing process, or the channel through which the customer finds the company. If the majority of potential customers lack a sufficient need, budget, or reason to buy, increasing the headcount will not solve the problem. It will only increase the number of people working within the same flawed system.
That is why designing sales starts earlier than designing the sales team. It starts with the customer.
First, you must understand how the customer makes a decision
This isn’t yet about creating a persona or describing the target audience. It’s about understanding the situation in which the customer starts needing our solution. What prompts them to start looking in the first place? How do they identify the problem? What alternatives do they use before they find us? Who is involved in the decision? What must happen for the purchase to become more important than postponing the decision for later?
This is important because the sales process and the buying process are not the same thing.
A company might have a very well-defined funnel: lead, contact, meeting, offer, negotiation, sale. However, the customer does not have to go through these stages in that order, or even in the same way. They might do nothing for several months. They might first look for information on their own, compare solutions, and talk to other vendors. They might need the approval of several people. They could also make a decision very quickly if a specific trigger appears.
If we don’t understand this, we might end up very efficiently managing a process that was poorly designed.
This is where concepts like customer journey, Jobs to Be Done, buying journey, or buying committee come into play. However, it’s not about knowing all these terms. What matters more is the question behind them: what actually leads the customer from the emergence of a need to the purchasing decision?
What are we actually selling?
The next element is the offer itself. A company might say it sells an ERP system, accounting services, training, or a technological solution. But the customer isn’t necessarily buying exactly that.
They are buying less work, lower risk, greater control, time savings, or the ability to solve a specific problem.
The better a company understands this value, the easier it is to answer the next question: how should it be sold?
If the customer can independently understand the product, assess its value, and make a decision, part of the process can be moved to a digital channel. If the purchase is complex, expensive, and requires the involvement of several people on the customer’s side, a completely different model might be necessary. In one case, a simple checkout process is enough; in another, meetings, consultations, demonstrations, negotiations, and the involvement of several roles on both sides will be required.
This means that the sales model should stem from the nature of the business and how customers make decisions. Not the other way around.
The sales channel is also part of the design
Only at this point does the question of sales channels start making sense. A company can acquire customers through marketing, referrals, partnerships, direct sales, outbound, e-commerce, or marketplaces. Each of these channels creates a different workflow and different costs. Each also requires a different way of measuring effectiveness.
Direct sales might be justified for an expensive and complex solution, but hard to defend for a product that a customer can buy for a fraction of the cost without human contact. On the other hand, automating the process does not always mean simpler sales. If the customer needs to understand a complicated offer or convince several people in their organization, simply providing a “Buy” button won’t change much.
The choice of channel is therefore a consequence of previous decisions regarding the customer, the offer, and the purchasing method.
Sales can also be calculated
If we want to achieve a specific revenue, we need to know how many customers are required to reach it. If we know the average deal size, we can calculate the number of sales needed. If we know the probability of closing a sales opportunity, we can estimate the required number of opportunities. If we know how many potential customers move to the next stage, we can work backwards even further.
Let’s assume a company wants to achieve one million in sales, and the average deal size is 20,000. It therefore needs 50 transactions. If it wins one out of every four qualified sales opportunities, it needs about 200 such opportunities. If half of the properly qualified leads turn into a sales opportunity, it needs about 400 leads.
In this way, the sales goal starts turning into a model that can be analyzed.
The point isn’t to treat these numbers as an exact forecast. It’s about changing the mindset. Instead of exclusively asking “how much do we want to sell?”, we can ask: what needs to happen to make such a result possible?
At this stage, terms like sales funnel, conversion rate, win rate, sales cycle, pipeline velocity, or sales forecasting begin to emerge. Each of them allows us to look at a different part of the mechanism that generates revenue.
Only now does the question about sales reps arise
The headcount of your sales team should not be the first decision. It should stem from how much work the designed sales model generates and what portion of that work can be handled by a single person.
If one sales rep can effectively handle a specific number of sales opportunities per month, and the company needs significantly more, the question of sales capacity arises. But the answer won’t always be hiring more people. Perhaps you need to change how leads are qualified, the division of roles, automation, or the process itself.
In one organization, a single person might guide the customer from the first contact to signing the contract. In another, a division into roles responsible for acquiring the customer, closing the sale, and subsequently developing the relationship will be needed. Yet another company might shift most of the process to a digital channel, leaving only the most complex cases to the sales team.
That is why the question “how many sales reps do we need?” is, in reality, a question about the entire system’s capacity to handle sales.
Data shows the problem, but not always its cause
Sales is an area where it’s very easy to start managing by numbers. Lead volume, conversion rate, win rate, average deal size, length of the sales cycle, customer acquisition cost, or revenue generated per rep—all these metrics can be useful.
However, metrics alone do not solve the problem. They primarily show where it’s worth looking.
If the conversion rate drops from 30 to 20 percent, we know something has changed. We just don’t know why yet. The cause might be a change in lead quality, a different customer segment, a new competitor’s offer, a higher price, a longer decision-making process, or the way the team works. The exact same number can therefore be the result of completely different phenomena.
Therefore, sales design requires not only measuring results but also understanding the mechanism that produces those results.
This is where more advanced areas of analysis become useful: sales analytics, cohort analysis, unit economics, customer acquisition cost, or lifetime value. Not because every company must immediately implement all these models. Rather, because they allow us to ask increasingly precise questions about the economics of sales.
Designing sales is designing a system
This is perhaps the most important difference between sales management and sales design.
When managing sales, we can observe the outcome and try to improve it. When designing sales, we try to understand the entire system of dependencies that creates this outcome. We look at the customer, the offer, the decision-making process, the outreach channels, the process, the roles, the data, and the economics of the entire model.
Only then does the question about sales reps become truly interesting. It no longer sounds like: “how many people do we need?”. Instead, it becomes: “what kind of system do we need for sales to operate the way we expect?”
There is no single correct sales model. One company will need an extensive sales team, another partner sales, and yet another a self-service model. In one organization, role specialization will work best, while in another, a single person will guide the customer from the first contact to the signed contract. The model depends on the product, customer, price, purchase complexity, length of the sales cycle, and many other factors.
That is why sales design is not about finding the best model out there. It’s about finding the model that fits the reality of a specific company.
And perhaps this is exactly where we should start when a company says it wants to “increase sales.” Not with the question of how many reps to hire. Not with a new CRM system. Not with another sales techniques training.
But rather with an attempt to understand how sales are generated in this specific company and what must happen for them to be generated in a repeatable way.