2 Objections to Sales Specialization & 4 Reasons To Just Do It

When sales is like a tangled ball of yarn you can’t tease apart…

Some people still need help convincing their team to go all-in with specialization. It can be daunting to take a sales team that has been closing and managing their own accounts, and then ask them to change……everything. Here are 2 of the most common objections we see when it comes to specializing:

1.) It’ll Hurt Customer Relationships

“Doesn’t passing off a prospect or customer from one person to another create problems? Shouldn’t the same person be building a relationship from Day One with a customer, then owning and maintaining it?”

No –– not if you have a pre-defined process to hand off customers thoughtfully, and you set their expectations appropriately. In fact, prospects and customers get better service this way.

Specialists at each of these steps guarantees that prospects get quick responses appropriate to their needs:

1. Inbound lead qualification

2. Outbound prospecting

3. Closing new business

4. Post-sales: account management, professional svcs., customer success

It’s hard for a salesperson who’s working on proposals, or traveling, to drop everything and get back right away to a new inbound lead, an urgent problem at a current customer, or to focus on much of anything important that’’ s not getting them to their quota this period. So by specializing –– in a way that makes sense for your business –– you’re doing customers a favor, too.

2.) “Those 4 Roles Don’t Fit Us”

The core roles discussed are not absolute requirements –– but a starting template for you to adapt. Almost every b2b company should have at least three of those four roles, but there are exceptions, as we listed out earlier. Implement the principle behind specialization ––focus–– in your own way. Give people fewer, more important things that they can do better. Also – the principle works in any team –– marketing, customer support, partners, etc.

4 Important Reasons To Specialize

1. Effectiveness:

When people are focused on one area, they become experts. For example, in 10 years, we’ve never met a team of generalized salespeople that didn’t struggle with generating or responding to leads.

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2. Farm team/talent:

Having multiple roles in sales gives you a simple career path to hire, train, grow and promote people internally. This creates a much cheaper, less risky, and more effective way to recruit, rather than relying too heavily on outside hires. (A rule of thumb: Over the long term, grow 2/3 of your people internally and hire 1/3 externally for new ideas and blood.)

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3. Insights:

By breaking your roles into separate functions, you can easily identify and fix your bottlenecks. When everyone is doing everything, it’s like having a tangled ball of yarn you can’t tease apart.

.4. Scalability:

Specialization makes it easier to hire, train, measure, grow and promote people across the board.