Sample frameDay 223·Sales · Structure

Good morning. Finding, closing, keeping. Give all three to one person and you already know which one goes quiet.

Sales.

Split the Role

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Go through what your best salesperson actually did last week, hour by hour, and count the hours that went to accounts which don't exist yet — and when that number turns out to be close to zero, whose design failure is it?

The idea

Aaron Ross joined Salesforce.com in the early 2000s and built something unusual: a team of people who prospected into cold accounts and weren't allowed to close anything. Their job ended at a qualified meeting, handed to somebody else. Predictable Revenue (2011), written with Marylou Tyler, is the account of how that team worked, and the book credits those practices with adding a hundred million dollars of recurring revenue at Salesforce. You already know the mechanism that makes the split necessary, because it isn't a sales idea at all: closing has a quarter-end, keeping has a renewal date, finding has neither, and work with a date beats work without one every week of the year. That's the urgent-crowding-out-important problem wearing a sales lanyard, and it's settled. What isn't settled is the design question underneath — how far to split, at what volume splitting starts paying for itself, and which of the three jobs to separate first. Get those wrong and specialisation costs more than it returns: copy the four-role structure into a business closing a dozen deals a year and you've bought handoffs, context loss and coordination meetings in exchange for very little. The structure isn't the point. The one job your business is worst at is the point.

The framework

01
Protection by structure, not by willpower.
The rep who skipped their calls this week to service a live deal made the right choice given how you built the job, and no amount of encouragement out-argues a calendar. Splitting the role doesn't make anyone more disciplined — it removes the choice, because someone whose entire week is measured in qualified meetings has no live deal to be pulled into. Which is why the half-split fails: give your new finder a small closing quota to keep them busy, or let them run the deals they source, and by week three you've rebuilt the exact conflict you were paying to remove.
02
Four roles, four numbers.
Ross splits the work further than most people expect. Inbound qualification works the leads that arrived on their own, and carries the speed and conversion of those leads. Outbound prospecting goes after accounts that have never heard of you, and carries meetings created from cold. Closing runs a qualified meeting through to signature, and carries deals won. Account management keeps and grows what's already been sold, and carries revenue retained and expanded. Four roles, four numbers, no two of them sharing one — because the moment two roles are judged on the same figure you've drawn an org chart rather than split a job.
03
Specialisation has a floor.
Beneath a certain volume, splitting costs more than it returns, and one person carrying the relationship end to end is genuinely better. The floor is arithmetic rather than taste, so do the arithmetic. A dedicated finder pays for themselves at the point where the meetings they create each month, converted at your rate, at your average deal size, at your gross margin, cover what they cost you fully loaded. Until that day arrives, split the time instead of the headcount: one protected block a week, or one person seconded to nothing but finding, with a number attached to them and nobody else.
04
Split the job your business is worst at, and only that one.
You don't need the full four-role structure to get the benefit; you need one specialist pointed at the actual failure. No new logos and a pipeline built entirely on referrals means finding is the gap. A full pipeline that stalls at proposal means closing is. A healthy top and a leaking base means keeping is. Diagnose it from last year's numbers rather than from how the team feels, separate that single job, and let it run two quarters before you touch anything else — reorganising the whole team buys you disruption in three places at once and tells you nothing about which one worked.

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