Table of Contents
A lot of founder-led businesses didn’t really design their commercial team.
It just sort of happened.
Someone was good with people, so they started managing accounts. Someone else was outgoing and comfortable in meetings, so they became the salesperson. The organized person somehow inherited the CRM.
A few years later, everybody has a title, everybody is busy, and the founder is still involved in half the commercial process.
That’s usually a commercial team design problem.
We built the team around the people we had instead of starting with the work the business actually needed done.
And those are two very different things.
Sales Team Design Starts With the Work
The commercial system has different stages.
Demand generation. Conversion. Customer success. Account management. Pricing.
And underneath those stages are even more specific functions: lead generation, qualification, proposal development, closing, onboarding, account management, and customer success.
We tend to lump a lot of that together under “sales.”
That’s where things start breaking down.
The person who is great at opening doors may not be the person you want trying to close a complicated deal. The person who can close may not be the person you want managing the relationship for the next three years.
Some people can handle several functions extremely well.
Most can’t.
Good commercial team design starts by asking what functions need to happen consistently, then deciding who has the right strengths to own each one.
Not, “What should we have this person do?”
Instead, “What does this part of the business require?”
Then we match the person to the function.
Sales Team Design and the BDR Role
Business Development Representatives own outbound prospecting.
Their job is to identify qualified prospects, make the initial contact, and create the first qualified conversation.
They aren’t there to close.
They produce qualified pipeline.
That takes a particular personality. Persistence. Organization. Resilience. Someone who can make a lot of contacts without letting rejection get inside their head.
In a lot of founder-led companies, the founder is still doing this work.
It makes sense historically. The founder probably created the first customers personally, so prospecting simply stayed with them as the company grew.
But think about the tradeoff.
Every hour the founder spends generating their own pipeline is an hour they aren’t spending on qualification conversations, proposals, or conversion work that may actually require their experience.
We’ve kept the founder doing the lowest-value part of the process because they’re good at it.
That’s not necessarily the same as saying they should still own it.
A junior BDR taking over that prospecting function can typically pay for themselves in six months or less.
Closing Deals Requires a Different Skill
Once the prospect is qualified, the work changes.
Sales executives own the conversion process from qualified lead to signed contract.
They’re navigating the buying process. They’re trying to understand what is actually driving the decision and positioning the company’s offer against the other alternatives.
That’s different from prospecting.
At a more senior level, an account executive may continue managing the relationship through the first year, creating a bridge between the initial sale and longer-term account management.
We sometimes assume our best salesperson should simply own the customer forever.
But selling the first deal and growing an established relationship are different jobs.
Which brings us to account management.
Account Managers Protect and Grow What You’ve Already Won
Account managers own retention and expansion.
The customer is already here.
Now the job is keeping the relationship strong, making sure they renew, and identifying additional commercial opportunities inside the account.
That requires less emphasis on persuasion and more emphasis on relationship depth, proactive communication, and recognizing where another opportunity exists.
This distinction matters because commercial team design isn’t just about getting more customers.
It’s also about what happens after we get them.
We can spend all of our attention trying to create new revenue while giving very little thought to who actually owns the revenue already sitting inside the business.
Customer Success Isn’t Account Management
These two roles often get blended together too.
In companies with complicated onboarding or ongoing delivery, customer success owns the delivery experience. Their responsibility is making sure the customer achieves the outcome they purchased.
Account management builds commercially on the relationship customer success helped create.
The functions should work in sequence.
Customer success makes sure the customer gets what they bought.
Account management looks for the opportunity to retain and expand the relationship.
When we make one person responsible for everything, we shouldn’t be surprised when one part gets neglected.
The Commercial Role Founders Usually Ignore
Sales operations isn’t glamorous.
It’s also one of the functions founder-led businesses are most likely to be missing.
Sales operations owns the infrastructure behind the commercial system: CRM configuration, pipeline reporting, forecasting, conversion analysis, and the commercial data management needs to make decisions.
A lot of smaller companies treat this as administrative work.
PE-backed companies tend to treat it as essential.
There’s a reason.
Without clean information, we’re trying to manage revenue through conversations, opinions, and whatever somebody remembers from the last sales meeting.
Below about $5 million in revenue, a strong generalist with commercial and analytical ability can often handle the function.
Above $5 million, a dedicated sales operations resource is almost always a positive-return investment.
That’s one of the clearest examples of commercial team design changing as the company grows.
The structure that got us here doesn’t automatically become the structure that takes us forward.
Eventually Someone Has to Own the Whole Commercial System
Someone also needs to own how all these functions work together.
That’s the commercial director.
Marketing, sales, customer success, and account management can’t operate like separate departments pursuing separate goals. The commercial director is accountable for integrating them into one system capable of producing predictable revenue growth.
In a lot of founder-led companies below $10 million, the founder fills this role by default.
And for a while, that works.
Until it doesn’t.
The founder is trying to lead the commercial system while also running the rest of the company. As the business grows, those two jobs start competing for the same person.
That’s the bigger issue behind commercial team design.
We aren’t just assigning titles.
We’re deciding which parts of the revenue engine depend on which people, and whether the founder is still sitting in the middle of functions someone else could own.
The company may have grown because the founder could sell, prospect, manage relationships, review the CRM, solve onboarding problems, and keep everyone moving.
But growth eventually turns those strengths into a capacity problem.
If every commercial road still leads back to the founder, we haven’t really built a commercial team.
We’ve built support around the founder.
And eventually, there aren’t any more hours left to give.
Justin D Maxwell provides family office and investment bank services to the lower midmarket to founders who want 8 or 9 figure net worths. You can learn more here: www.justindmaxwell.com or take our free assessment here: https://fielding.global/articles/diagnostic.html