Outbound Lead Generation Team Reporting Structures: Option #2

This post continues my series on outbound lead gen team reporting structures by looking at a variation of the reporting structure we looked at in my previous post. In this structure, outbound lead generation remains under sales, but the primary difference is that reps report directly to a sales manager rather than a lead generation manager.

Structure 2: Lead generation representatives report directly up to the sales manager, with dotted-line management to the sales representative who they support. There is no lead generation team manager.

This reporting structure divides accountability for lead generation and loads management of the lead generation team onto each sales manager. This can be a great structure for sales teams that are divided into specialized groups by geography, or vertical. The structure is conducive to intra-team planning and collaboration, which will help each group get even more specialized, increasing organizational knowledge, and yielding better results.

Similar to Structure 1, it also includes dotted line management to the sales representatives that are being supported so that those bonds can form firmly.

However, this approach can be risky if you have less experienced sales managers.

It will add management responsibilities onto their plate, and inexperienced managers may write these off as lower priority. As a result, they may not pay close enough attention to developing the individual lead generation representatives and improving their performance.

This structure is also less conducive to inter-team collaboration among lead generation representatives, so extra efforts will need to be made to disseminate best practices and maintain process consistency across teams. Another disadvantage of this structure is that it tends be the most insulated from the marketing team.

This means that extra efforts will have to be made on the part of marketing as well as sales management in order to make sure feedback from the lead generation team is getting communicated and that lead generation representatives are on message from a corporate and specialized perspective.

In the final post in the series, when we’ll switch things up and investigate what it looks like when the lead generation team reports to marketing.