How to Build a Sales Team: Structure and Hiring from 5 to 100 Reps

Key Takeaway: To build a sales team, write down how your team sells. Pick a structure that fits your deal size. Add managers before the team outgrows them. The steps are the same at 5 reps and at 100. What changes is who can still hear the calls. At 20 reps, that is 728 calls a quarter. In Ken Lundin’s experience at RevHeat, that is where teams start to drift.

Step 1: What do you need in place before you add reps?

Three things, on paper.

1. Your ideal customer. Industry, company size, the title that buys, and the problem they pay to fix.
2. Your sales process. The stages a deal moves through, and what has to be true to move from one stage to the next.
3. The questions reps ask. The discovery and qualifying questions that separate a real deal from a polite conversation.

If the process lives only in your best seller’s head, every new rep invents their own. At 5 reps that is a nuisance. At 50 it is five different companies selling under one logo. See how to build a sales playbook for a starting point.

Step 2: How should you structure a sales team?

There are three common structures. Choose by deal size, sales cycle and how much of your revenue comes from existing customers.

You can move from one to another as you grow.

When should you split out account management?

When growing existing accounts starts competing with new deals for the same rep’s time. Farming is a skill worth hiring for on its own. RevHeat analyzed data from Objective Management Group on 12,745 salespeople. It compared the top 10% with the bottom 10% across 30 sales skills. Top performers outscored the bottom 10% on Farming by 330.00%.

Step 3: How does the team change from 5 reps to 100?

In Ken’s experience, the jump that catches teams out is the one past 20. Below it, a good manager can still hear enough. Above it, the leader is reading reports about reports.

At 60 reps across several countries, even the forecast needs translating. “80% likely” can mean “I’m sandbagging” in one office and “I’m protecting my job” in another.

Step 4: What order should you hire in?

1. Reps who can sell and report back. Early hires test whether the process works. Hire people who can tell you what buyers actually said.
2. First-line managers before the team outgrows the leader’s time. The job is coaching and checking, not closing the manager’s own deals. Budget for it. According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the median sales manager earned $148,270 in May 2025. If a full-time hire is too early, a fractional sales manager is one option.
3. Specialists once the numbers justify them. Add SDRs when AEs spend more time prospecting than running deals. Add account managers when renewals and expansion start slipping.
4. Sales operations once reporting gets messy. Someone has to own the CRM, the data and the forecast.
5. A second layer of management and enablement as you pass 20–30 reps. Managers need a manager. New reps need onboarding that doesn’t depend on who they sit next to.

For interview questions and tests, see how to hire sales reps.

Step 5: How many calls can a sales team actually check?

Here’s the math. At about 3 calls a rep a week, and 20 minutes to read each one:

At 10 reps, that’s about 9 hours a week. At 20, it’s about 19. At 100, it’s more than two full-time people doing nothing but reading. No manager does that and still runs a team.

So what happens instead? Coaching runs on memory. Forecasts run on opinion. Nobody finds out a rep stopped asking the qualifying question until the quarter is gone.

Step 6: What should you measure?

Measure results and behavior. Results tell you what happened. Behavior tells you why.

• Results: revenue, quota attainment, win rate, average deal size, sales cycle length.
• Pipeline: new opportunities, pipeline for next quarter, deals with a dated next step.
• Behavior: whether each rep ran the key steps of your sales process on real calls.

In Ken’s experience, the last one is the one teams skip. In the same analysis, top performers beat the bottom 10% on Sales Process by 375.00%. They beat them on CRM Savvy by 283.33%. A sales performance review template helps you track all three.

Step 7: How do you keep the team running the process?

Training fades. In Ken’s experience, it starts fading within days. Every rep learns the process in onboarding. Then each one drifts toward their own version.

What holds it in place is a weekly check on real calls. RevHeat calls this The Enforcement Loop:

1. Read every call. Not just the ones you had time for.
2. Tell each rep what to ask on the next call. Word for word.
3. Remember exactly what you told each of them.
4. Watch the next call to see if they did it.
5. Catch the slip and fix it before it becomes a habit.
6. Roll what works into a sharper playbook. Then start over.

What mistakes should you avoid when building a sales team?

• Hiring before the process is written down. Each rep builds their own. Then you can’t compare them.
• Promoting the best seller to manager by default. Selling and coaching are different jobs. Test for coaching.
• Adding specialists too early. An SDR with too few AEs to feed wastes both roles.
• Growing past 20 reps on the same management setup. What worked when you could hear every rep stops working quietly.
• Measuring only results. By the time the number is missed, the deals were lost weeks ago.

What changes when you build a sales team that checks every week?

Look back at the table in Step 5. If your managers stopped listening to calls somewhere past 10 reps, they didn’t drop the ball. At 20 reps, hearing every call takes 243 hours a quarter. Those hours were never on anyone’s calendar.

What the check gives you depends on your size:

• 5 to 10 reps: By Monday you can say why the last one died.
• 20 to 50 reps: Managers report what happened instead of what they think.
• 60 to 100+ reps: The same word means the same thing in every country, and marketing gets what the buyer said rather than a rep’s memory of it.

FAQ

How do you build a sales team?

Define your ideal customer and write down your sales process first. Pick a structure that fits your deal size. Add managers before the team outgrows the leader’s time. Then check every week that reps run the process on real calls.

What is the best sales team structure?

There is no single best one. Full-cycle reps fit simple deals. Specialized roles (SDR, AE, account manager) fit higher volume and longer cycles. Pods fit teams selling into several distinct segments.

How do you scale a sales team from 20 to 100 reps?

Add a second layer of management, sales operations and enablement. Standardize how deals are staged and forecast, so every team means the same thing by the same number. And build a way to check real calls that doesn’t depend on managers finding the time.

How do you structure a B2B sales team?

Start with your deal size and sales cycle. Long, complex B2B deals are the case for splitting prospecting from closing. Split account growth from new business once existing customers are a large share of revenue.

When should you hire a sales manager?

Before the leader can no longer coach every rep personally. A manager’s job is to coach and check that reps run the process, not to close deals.

What roles are on a sales team?

Common roles are sales development reps (SDRs), account executives (AEs) and account managers. Add sales managers, sales operations and, in larger teams, sales enablement.

Related Reading

• How to Manage a Sales Team
• How to Hire Sales Reps
• Fractional Sales Manager: Cost vs. Full-Time

Ken Lundin is CEO of RevHeat, the Sales Enforcement company. Over 25 years he has sold, run sales teams and helped 200+ teams, including 5 unicorns, generate $1.5B in client sales, with two exits ($250M and $30M) and four appearances on the Inc. 500. He is a Forbes Business Council member and the author of Strategic Selling Unleashed, Broken Playbook and The SmartScaling Formula.