I live in Orlando, and I love it, but the rapid growth over the last 60 years has created a mess.
In 1965, Orlando was the 55th largest media market in the United States. In 2024, it was the 15th! There was no planning for this growth. No long-term strategy for infrastructure or zoning or healthcare. Central Florida simply boomed, and community leaders patched the holes along the way. However, it’s not the fault of the leaders. Sixty years ago, no one imagined this type of incredible growth. Within a few years, Walt Disney decided to build his dream here, NASA decided to launch rockets off the east coast of Central Florida, and Arnold Palmer thought Orlando was a cool place to build a golf course. Those three things changed the area forever. But no one saw it coming and all of a sudden, we had traffic like Los Angeles or Chicago, kids were attending classes in portable classrooms, and our tiny airport in the 1970’s and 80’s couldn’t handle the volume. We’re in a good spot now, but it’s taken decades of construction and investments and unique taxes to get us ahead of the growth.
Many sales teams we see look like Central Florida in 1990: many moving parts with no one knowing what the overall plan is. Many of our clients have grown so quickly that they hired salespeople to fill holes that were urgent to fill at one moment in time. It was a crisis that needed to be solved. Now they might have a vertical market manager that only sells fire systems, two account managers that manage current accounts, three other salespeople that manage accounts and new sales, one that only sells services and another one that calls on GC’s, except the two GC’s that focus on the targeted vertical markets – that’s the responsibility of the fire systems person. They all have different compensation plans. Customers are confused. Salespeople are frustrated. And six people are doing the work of four because of the inefficiencies.
Sound familiar? How do you fix it? How do you create a model that scales and becomes more efficient with more sales?
It’s not easy, but it starts out fun – simply answer the four questions below:
- What type of sales do you want to generate?
- What markets do you want to pursue?
- How much and what type of revenue do you want to generate in 10 years?
- How does your sales team need to look in 10 years to achieve these goals?
Once you’ve answered these questions, specifically the last one, then you need to map the sales team model that you hope to have in 10 years back to what you currently have. You’ll realize that there isn’t a direct map – it’s one of those “you can’t get there from here” moments. However, you’ll start to see when you can combine roles, move people into different expectations, etc. As you work through the process, it’s wise not to change overnight. However, you shouldn’t take more than nine to eighteen months to make the complete shift to a new and scalable model.
The important thing here is to zoom out to define where you want to be in 10 years. If you’ve been to Orlando in the last four years, you probably noticed that our roads look like highways in Dallas or Atlanta, two significantly larger metro areas. That’s because our leaders looked into the future and built a scalable infrastructure into which we can grow over the next several decades. Do the same thing with your sales organization. Define the model and begin to do the hard work now to grow into it.
