Determining your sales organization structure: A guide

Every sales leader wants a team that performs at its best at all times.

But with constant change and evolving buyer expectations, keeping a sales organization running smoothly has never been harder. What used to be a predictable, process-driven function is now a complex ecosystem—one that demands adaptability, cross-functional collaboration, and constant upskilling.

“Sales organizations have undergone an average of four transformations,” said Greg Hessong, Sr. Director, Analyst, in the Gartner Sales Practice. “While CSOs have a variety of mechanisms at their disposal to drive productivity, it’s often unclear which are most effective, especially in a rapidly shifting landscape.”

That uncertainty is showing in the numbers.

Gartner’s The DNA of Top Sales Organizations found only 11% of sales orgs say they can drive commercial success while executing a transformation.

Proactively thinking through how and why your sales organization is set up a certain way—clarifying roles, aligning priorities, and building support systems—ensures you create conditions for lasting performance and growth.

What is sales organization structure?

Sales organization structure refers to the design of your sales team and segmentation of reps into specialized groups. The regions and industries a given company serves, the number and types of products and services they offer, and the size of their sales team are key factors that influence org structure.

Sales organization structure is important as it sets sellers up for success. After all, you wouldn’t put a new recruit in charge of your enterprise accounts; similarly, a rep with deep experience in healthcare would probably struggle to sell into tech.

A strong sales team structure not only aligns reps and account executives with the right opportunities but also maximizes their unique skills, experience, and knowledge. When done well, your sales organization becomes a system that drives consistent performance and allows your business to scale efficiently.

In this video, GitLab discusses how operational excellence drives its go-to-market strategy with Highspot, boosting alignment and productivity.

Key considerations for deciding on your sales organizational structure

Thoughtful design of your sales organization will allow you to capitalize on individual capabilities and experiences, while also ensuring the right sellers target the right customers.

Once you’ve mapped your team’s strengths and buyer needs, it’s time to choose the best sales team structure that matches your market and supports your overall sales strategy. Here are the different team structures and when they make sense.

Customer or account size

This org structure is a widely used approach, especially when your customer base ranges from small businesses to enterprises. The skills, strategies, and conversations required for SMBs are different from those needed for enterprise accounts.

Enterprise reps must navigate longer sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and complex procurement processes. Aligning your sales team members by account size allows them to better understand their buyers’ goals and tailor their approach for maximum impact.

Product or service line

If your company sells multiple products or services, aligning your organization by product line can sharpen sales performance quickly. This approach helps your sales team focus on mastering one solution, understand its strongest use cases, and direct their sales efforts toward the most promising opportunities.

Leads feel that expertise immediately, which often leads to faster discovery and more confident decision-making across their B2B buying journey.

This sales organization structure also strengthens communication between sales and product teams. Because your reps are seeing the same patterns across deals, they can surface insights around feature gaps, positioning issues, or friction in the buying experience. That clarity helps you refine each product’s narrative.

Product line org structure works best when your company focuses on one industry. However, if you are selling multiple products across multiple industries, your sales reps can become stretched across too many priorities.

For this reason, it requires greater coordination to keep deals on track.

Geographic or territory

This sales team structure approach is a good fit when your market is widely distributed and buyers in different regions have distinct needs or local market dynamics. Aligning your teams by location helps them respond faster to opportunities and understand regional competitors better.

This sales organizational structure also helps reduce costs. Your sales reps stay close to their accounts, cutting travel and relocation expenses.

The main challenge is that this might lead to teams working in silos. Customers spanning multiple territories can experience inconsistent sales messaging, unless clear handoff rules and cross-region coordination are in place.

Industry or vertical

An industry- or vertical-based structure organizes sales teams around specific markets, such as healthcare, finance, or manufacturing. By focusing on a single vertical, your reps become experts in the language, pain points, and buying patterns of their market.

When managed carefully, vertical alignment can boost customer confidence and help your team sell more effectively in complex markets. However, it comes with a higher investment in talent, training, and coordination than other structures.

The 3 most popular sales organization models your team could adopt

You can further segment your sales team based on the following sales organization models: the assembly line, the island, and the pod. Each model comes with its own benefits and limitations.

Keep in mind that as your company grows, additional segmentation will be necessary to ensure that reps develop the specialized skills necessary to serve particular markets or target certain accounts.

1. Assembly line structure

In the assembly line, also known as the hunter-farmer model, sales teams are organized based on each individual’s job title. The name stems from similarities between sales operations under this model and manufacturing assembly lines.

In both cases, specialized workers perform a specific task—and in sales, that task is moving buyers through a certain aspect of the customer journey.

Typically, account or sales development representatives generate pipeline or nurture marketing-qualified leads. These leads are eventually handed off to an account executive, who then completes the sale.

Once a deal is closed, customers are handed off to the customer success team or an account manager who maintains the relationship throughout the customer’s life cycle.

Pros of assembly line sales team structure	Cons of assembly line sales team structure
• Maximizes operational efficiency via specialization • Deepens rep expertise in specific sales motions • Moves customers through your sales process quickly	• Runs risk of silos and miscommunication across teams • Runs risk of poor customer experience due to many handoffs • Incurs additional costs due to task specialization

2. Island structure

With the island model, every seller is a generalist: an individual sales rep will manage a single customer from sales prospecting to onboarding. This means that a rep will generate, qualify, and close leads on their own.

While this method gives reps a high level of autonomy to build and grow customer relationships, it also puts a lot of pressure on individuals to perform.

For some businesses, this is a plus, as it creates a highly competitive sales culture.

Due to its simplicity and emphasis on individual success, it is frequently adopted by businesses with smaller sales teams who are looking to get more output per hire or where one-to-one customer relationships are prised, like in the financial services industry.

Pros of island sales team structure	Cons of island sales team structure
• Creates an individualistic, competitive culture • Streamlines customer-seller relationships • Maximizes individual rep output	• Presents challenges to managing numerous accounts at different stages of the customer lifecycle • Prioritizes individual success over collaboration • Is not suited to scale

3. Pod structure

This model mixes elements from both the island and assembly line models. Like the island method, a single pod will partner with a customer from prospecting all the way to solution onboarding.

But like the assembly line, each pod will have reps specialized in a specific aspect of the customer journey, including an account or business development rep, an account executive, and an account manager.

The pod sales model is favored by larger businesses that want an easy way to segment its sales teams. That’s because leadership can easily assign (and reassign) pods to certain product lines, geographies, verticals, and more, as needed. Meanwhile, sales managers have clear visibility into performance across specialized roles.

Pods can also be used for account-based sales, as they can focus on key accounts and deliver a seamless customer experience through consistent engagement.

Pros of pod sales team structure	Cons of pod sales team structure
• Reduces silos between sales roles and functions • Enables smoother lead handoff due to enhanced collaboration • Allows leadership to make agile sales team adjustments	• Makes individual motivation difficult • Allows poor performers to hide behind successful teammates • Emphasizes any friction between individuals in the same pod

Tips to best structure your B2B sales team for growth and performance

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to designing a sales org. Instead of defaulting to a popular model, just because similar businesses in or adjacent to your space adopt it, look at the factors shaping your sales pipeline, people, and buyers.

1. Start by assessing your sales motion

Understanding how deals move through your sales funnel and which sales activities cause bottlenecks is critical to designing the right sales team structure for your organization. It also ensures every stage of your sales process aligns with your business goals.

Are your reps spending too much time with sales prospecting? Are handoffs getting sloppy? Are enterprise cycles dragging because no one owns the technical part of the sale?

Patterns like these tell you whether you need specialization (assembly line), autonomy (island), or a hybrid sales structure (pod).

2. Match your structure to your buyers

Where your buyers are, what they need, and how they make decisions should drive both your core model and your segmentation. If your buyer landscape is diverse, you may need coverage models like geographic, vertical, or product-based alignment to keep reps focused and relevant on a specific market segment.

On the other hand, if most of your revenue comes from one type of account, a simpler structure may outperform a highly segmented one.

Consider mapping buyer journeys to rep responsibilities. Identify where handoffs, specialization, or multi-threaded engagement will have the biggest impact, then design your team around those critical points.

3. Look at your GTM support ecosystem

Sales enablement, revenue operations, and marketing teams are essential GTM partners in creating a successful sales organization structure.

If those functions are well-coordinated, you can take on more complex setups, such as pods or assembly lines, because you have the systems, training, and data to keep everything running and aligned with your business objectives.

Before committing to a sales organization structure, pressure-test it with your current level of operational maturity. Ask yourself: If we launched this tomorrow, which process would break first?

That answer often tells you which model you can realistically sustain today and what you need to build for the B2B sales model you want in the future.

4. Be realistic about your business goals

Your sales structure should fit the team you have today, but it also needs enough flexibility to handle the team you’re building toward. Maybe you don’t need a full pod model right now— especially if you’re still early or running lean—but you might hit a wall once you move upmarket or expand your product line.

Map out what your sales organization should look like at twice your current headcount. If your current structure won’t scale to that level without major disruption, it’s a sign you’ll need a flexible model that can evolve instead of forcing a full rebuild later.

5. Factor in what AI tech can do for you

AI sales tools are reshaping how teams work, and they should influence how you design your structure. Tasks that once consumed hours—like outbound research and pipeline tracking—can now be streamlined with AI, freeing reps to focus on strategic conversations and multi-threaded engagement.

Using an AI-powered sales enablement platform like Highspot can also help your reps level up their skills and make smarter decisions in the moment:

• Workflow automation: Handle routine tasks like follow-ups and content recommendations so reps can focus on selling.
• Purpose-built AI agents: Surface relevant buyer intelligence, prioritize accounts, and suggest next-best actions.
• AI-powered coaching: Provide real-time guidance during calls or deal reviews, helping reps make better decisions without waiting for manager input.
• Sales role play simulations: Run practice scenarios that sharpen messaging, objection handling, and multi-stakeholder engagement

With these tools, AI helps you maintain an effective sales team structure, reducing manual work while letting reps focus on high-value activities where human expertise matters most.

Best practices for building a high-performing sales organization structure

When shaping your sales organization, a few guiding habits make all the difference. These best practices help your team adapt and keep winning no matter how your structure evolves.

Simplicity beats sophistication

The ability to scale, while important, shouldn’t override present needs. If you have a small number of sellers and a limited budget, investing in an assembly line model might actually reduce the output of your sales team and stunt your growth.

What’s more, a simple structure with low segmentation will give you greater flexibility to make adjustments as your organization evolves. Finding ways to simplify your sales organizational structure ensures that already complex sales processes don’t become even more so.

Create a competency roadmap

Investing in your people is a surefire way to ensure that sellers evolve with your function. As your sales organization evolves (and inevitably reorganizes), sellers will likely fill increasingly specialized roles that require unique skills.

To keep your salespeople prepared, build a “competency roadmap” that details how you expect your salesforce to evolve and the core capabilities they must have in order to succeed.

For instance, if you are growing rapidly, try monthly training sessions focused on new markets and upcoming product releases. If you are already established, perhaps your sellers would benefit from career-based learning that helps them grow as individuals.

A deep investment in your sales team’s ongoing education is critical to ensuring they have the tactical know-how needed to thrive, regardless of how sales structures change.

Invest in your sales team culture

Selling is hard. From frustrating customer requests to frequent rejection, your sales team works tirelessly to ensure your business succeeds, and often with little thanks. That’s why sales culture is so important—it boosts morale and enables employees to do their best work.

You can ensure that your sales culture stays competitive by building values of compassion, support, and open communication into your company’s guiding principles. Additionally, make sure that your leaders, especially those on the sales team, live these sentiments every day.

Doing so ensures that even if your salespeople are divided by geographies, into pods, or something else entirely, they still feel like they’re part of a greater team.

How can an AI-powered sales enablement platform help my reps succeed?

It’s no secret that sales enablement is the backbone of a high-performing sales organization. At its core, enablement gives your reps the tools, knowledge, and guidance they need to do their jobs better and close deals faster.

Highspot’s State of Sales Enablement Report 2025 found that businesses using a unified enablement platform to power their GTM efforts are 42% more likely to boost win rates. The right platform can significantly improve sales performance by:

• Boosting collaboration and efficiency: By centralizing resources, tracking usage, and creating shared processes, enablement removes friction across teams and helps your organization operate at scale.
• Aligning sales and marketing: Quality content delivered at the right time ensures messaging resonates with buyers and keeps everyone on the same page.
• Supporting talent development: Enablement gives reps a clear path to growth and mastery, from onboarding to ongoing coaching and performance evaluation.
• Enhancing the buyer experience: When reps have the right content and guidance, buyers encounter a smoother, more relevant journey, increasing customer satisfaction and trust.

Think of enablement as the glue that connects your structure, your motions, and your people. A strong sales enablement function amplifies whatever org model you adopt, making every rep more prepared and every buyer interaction more effective.