Share This Article
What is POD in Sales?
POD in Sales refers to a sales group, a dedicated team of people within a company that focuses on a specific segment of customers. This can be done by assigning the entire team to a part or dividing it into smaller groups, each focusing on its element. They are a relatively new structure for increasing revenue from business-level accounts.
If you’re unfamiliar with a sales pod , consider it an alternative to the traditional sales model, which, in most organizations, consists of field representatives and inbound salespeople dedicated to lead generation.
Structure of POD in Sales
The first thing to know about a sales module is that it is not just an organizational structure. Instead, it’s a combination of teams working under one umbrella to identify lead-generation opportunities and turn them into deals.
A pod typically contains some combination of SDR, AE, and CSM. A POD essentially works like an assembly line: each vendor fulfills a specific responsibility that enables the level after them in the pod sequence.
1. Sales Development Representatives
Sales development reps are the ones who find leads, educate them about your product, and get them to sign up for a free trial or demo of your software. After you convert this lead to an opportunity, you pass it on to someone else within the sales team, usually one of your account executives.
2. Account Executives
Account executives are responsible for managing existing accounts. This includes managing customer relationships, selling new products/features/updates, and helping customers resolve issues. A good account manager knows everything about their accounts because they represent most of their revenue (i.e., the top 20% of total bookings).
Some companies also require AXs to interact personally with current customers, so it’s essential to balance the needs here and provide enough resources so that account executives feel confident they know everything about their accounts.
3. Customer Success Managers
Customer Success Managers are responsible for managing relationships with customers who have multiple products/features/updates. This includes helping them solve problems and successfully use the product or service they purchased from your company.
CSMs also identify customer pain points, help specify requirements for potential new features, cross-sell additional services/products, provide fast and reliable support, and potentially onboard new customers. The idea behind this structure is that you will better deliver value to existing customers once you acquire them faster (i.e., increase monthly recurring revenue).
Benefits of sales PODS
Beyond the numbers, the sales modules helped us unlock some significant long-term benefits across all aspects of our sales organization.
1. A seamless customer experience
Before sales PODS, customers were passed from one department to another, with little communication. Each department had different goals that were measured differently, so there was little consideration for the prospect/customer post-handover. But with the sales capsules, each department worked together towards common goals:
- Identification of new clients
- closing more deals
- Ensure customer success
With each department focused on all three goals throughout the entire sales cycle, they were able to move customers through the pipeline seamlessly.
2. Improvement of relations between sales and CS
With each department working in unison, they strove to help each other succeed rather than compete. As a result, sales became more empathetic to CS’s challenges as customers became more involved and willing to help plan solutions. AEs had much deeper access to our support team, technical resources, and answers that could help them reduce friction with prospects and move deals through the pipeline faster.
Customer success was able to help SDRs and AEs better understand the ideal customer so they could avoid looking for leads that weren’t a great fit and set the stage for onboarding customers that were.
3. More confidence and experience
If the sales and customer success teams don’t communicate, both parties are missing out on knowledge that can benefit the sales organization as a whole. With CSMs getting involved in opportunities early on, SDRs and AEs listen and learn about technical and product aspects that are otherwise out of their reach.
On the other hand, customer success teams can start building relationships with prospects early on, allowing them to understand better their business and what the customer is looking for. This added trust gives customers peace of mind and helps CS provide a better experience during onboarding.
How to know if a POD in sales is working?
There are two ways of measuring success with POD:
Short term and Long term.
- For the Short term, set a goal for a certain number of deals to close by a specific date. Then, create metrics that determine whether the team in each group is on track to meet these goals at every step, from lead generation to deal closing.
These metrics should focus on how many meetings account executives have scheduled per month, how many demo calls to customer success managers they have to do each week, etc. In addition to these internal measurements, using a consultant as a third-party observer may also be beneficial during this period.
Setting up sales dashboards will help you monitor your team’s progress and stay current.
2. The long-term success of your sales group depends on how well you have defined the structure and whether or not it is scalable. If your organization is SaaS or has a similar business model, this should be easier than if you sell traditional products.
Implementation of POD in Sales
Four things should be considered before taking action:
- Define each position’s roles and responsibilities. This clarifies the expectations for account executives, customer success managers, and anyone who reports directly to them. Create a method to monitor performance.
- As mentioned above, having boards is ideal for this look. Find resources outside of your organization to help implement these methods. You’ll need someone objective to provide essential information about how it works together.
- Run initial tests on three different types of deals (small, medium, and large) to see if your sales group structure is right for your business. If so, expand to other deal sizes after reviewing the metrics and getting approval from senior management. If it doesn’t work, scrap the idea and start over.
- Before implementing a pod structure, be sure to: Outline your goals and measure results. This will also pay off in the long run. Create an internal training and onboarding process in which delegation is only one part. These new roles should also include mentoring and on-the-job learning so new hires can start working on day one.
What are some pitfalls to avoid when implementing POD in Sales?
Your sales pod structure can be easily damaged if you’re not careful. Three mistakes must be avoided:
- Make sure team members know their roles and responsibilities.
- When everyone understands what’s expected of them, it helps prevent misunderstandings. Hiring lower-level people for high-level jobs can damage morale. If folks aren’t happy working in this structure, they may take it out on their teammates. Poor planning leads to poor performance—period.
- Sales pods also need to have clearly defined goals and metrics to track success. Without these things, there’s no way to tell if the pods are adequate or need reworking.
Conclusion
Hence, Sales PODS are small cross-functional teams (in our case, AE and CSM) who work together to make resources more accessible to achieve a common goal. So instead of passing customers from one department to another as they move down the channel, multiple departments involves in each opportunity from start to finish.
At the core, the sales PODS helped us break down the silos that developed when different departments worked independently and didn’t communicate efficiently. While the roles themselves didn’t change, the way they interacted did. Instead of each department working individually, they collaborated to create a seamless journey from the first touch to onboarding.