Sales Management & Coaching
Sales Team Structure
Restructuring is the most satisfying way to avoid a harder problem. New ratios, new territories, a new layer of management, and six weeks of activity that feels like progress while the thing that was actually broken carries on.
By Shane McGrath · Published 24 August 2026
Before changing the shape of a team, it's worth being honest about what the change is meant to fix. Structure solves capacity and focus problems well. It solves capability problems not at all.
When to split prospecting from closing
Splitting the role works when your sellers genuinely can't do both, because deals demand too much attention or the market needs constant outbound. It fails when it's used to make prospecting somebody else's problem. Then you get AEs who can't create pipeline and SDRs booking meetings nobody wants.
Ratios are an output, not a decision
People ask what the right SDR to AE ratio is. The honest answer is that it depends on how many meetings an AE can genuinely run and progress in a week, and how many an SDR can book that survive contact with a calendar. Work out those two numbers in your own team and the ratio falls out of them. Copy someone else's and you're managing to their maths.
The management layer
- One manager coaching more than about seven or eight sellers stops coaching and starts reporting.
- Promoting your best seller is a decision to lose that seller. Make it deliberately or not at all.
- A player-coach with their own number will always choose their own deals under pressure.
- The first line manager decides whether anything you train survives. That's the job to get right.
Specialising by segment or product
Useful when buying behaviour genuinely differs: enterprise deals with six stakeholders don't run like SME ones with a signature. Harmful when it's imposed early, because it fragments a small team's learning and every seller ends up with too few deals to get good at anything.
What structure can't fix
If sellers don't understand buyer problems, no arrangement of them will change that. Reorganising a team that hasn't agreed what good looks like just redistributes the gap. Getting hiring and the coaching standard right first makes the structure question much easier, and often smaller than it looked.
The question before the reorg
What specifically will people do differently on the Monday after the change? If the answer is only "report to someone else," the problem is somewhere else.
FAQs
Common questions
- What's the right SDR to AE ratio?
- There isn't a universal one. It comes out of how many meetings an AE can genuinely progress each week and how many an SDR books that hold up. Work those out for your team rather than importing a number from a company with different deals.
- When should we hire a sales manager?
- When coaching stops happening because nobody has time, usually somewhere around six to eight sellers. The signal isn't headcount on its own, it's whether anyone is reviewing real calls with individuals every week.
- Should our best seller be promoted to manage?
- Only if they want the job that's actually there, which is developing other people rather than winning deals. Plenty of excellent sellers don't, and promoting them costs you a seller and gains you a frustrated manager.
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