The age of the overweight, bureaucratic, and slow to act corporation continues to struggle against the rising tide of adaptive and agile organizations. In the 1980s, University of Chicago economist Sherwin Rosen aptly coined our emerging market as the “superstar economy.” With an increasing ability for small organizations to reach millions of potential customers through the internet, the winnings go to those who can sell, market and act the with the fastest degree of precision.

This is not going to change, says New York Times, as it stated, “technological changes allow the best performers in a given field to serve a bigger market and thus reap a greater share of its revenue.”

These changes beneath our feet require action, and the smartest people in the room are taking note. Valve, the two billion dollar gaming organization that recently reported 200% year-over-year growth, is a prime example where innovative organizations are moving. With 250 employees, each employee is worth $87.5 million a year. Compare that to the $350,000 of each Google employee and you begin to take notice. How on earth are these hyper effective companies structuring to gain such performance? What can a sales organization learn from these changes and increase performance? Let’s take a look at cutting the fat. Here are three ways the sales organizational structure needs to change.

1. Reducing the Hierarchy

The first piece of the puzzle revolves around how these hyper effective companies structure themselves. Valve, for example, relies on what is known as a horizontal organizational structure. Rather than focusing on several layers of management to approve or disapprove of projects, each employee is allowed more autonomy in the work they perform. A Texas A&M study found that “peer-based rational control corresponded with higher performance for both individuals and collective teams.”

Point made? Less red tape and bottom-up systems tend to have higher performance. In your sales organization, it will become increasingly crucial to reduce management hierarchy in support of a more horizontal sales structure to empower your sales reps and react quickly to a more uncertain business environment.

What can Sales actually do?

Evaluate: Look at the structure of your own sales group. Booz and Company recently listed the most crucial factors to consider when structuring a sales organization:

• Product/service diversity: In organizations where the product mix is largely unified, they “can get away with maintaining fewer sales forces.” In organizations with more complex, differentiated products, multiple sales forces will be needed.

• Selling process: Can your sales process be simplified and applied to your entire sales force? This is critical, as  "over two-thirds of sales organizations leave 90% or more of the sales process up to the individual rep." Standardizing your sales process will lead to a faster turn around time on administrative reports, a major time saver considering Pace Productivity found that a typical sales rep spends 23% of his week performing administrative work.

2. Focusing on Best Performers in the New Hierarchy

The next piece of the puzzle focuses on not just your people, but your best performing people. A recent QZ.com article concludes that employee performance is not a normal bell curve distribution, but a “power law” distribution where a very small number of “hyper-performers” deliver a disproportionate amount of company value. In your sales organization, this is not necessarily news as Accenture found that, in 2009, only 53.3% of sales reps achieved their quota. Your best performers produce a large portion of company revenue and value, it is time to coach your talent pool towards their daily activities.

What can SalesaActually do?

• Measure and Coach: Measuring sales rep performance is not a new science. Several people have great posts regarding the right sales metrics to measure (Harvard Business Review, Inc.com), but the key here is to translate your findings into actionable advice for the rest of your sales team. What activities are you top performers continually taking and how does this differ from your worst performer? Coaching a sales pitch may be meaningless if the real issue is a poor first cold call or a lack in the number of demo presentations.

3. Rethinking your Data Use

A slow moving organizational hierarchy isn’t the only factor influencing poor sales performance. Big Data and metrics driven analytics has uncovered some surprising information. Accenture surveyed over 1,000 business managers in the U.S. and the U.K to find that “more than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them.” Worse yet, 59% said, “As a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs on a daily basis.” Making sales judgments and managerial calls should be enhanced by the presence of data, not inhibited by it. In your sales organization, there has never been a more pressing time than now to look at how your sales metrics are input, managed and used daily.

 What can sales actually do?

• Cleaning house: Never has the time been better to scrub your lead database for duplicates, missing information and incorrect data to reduce the possibility of poorly informed decisions. However, manual duplicate removal and data cleaning is very labor intensive, I suggest salesforce.com’s AppExchange for data cleansing.

• Training: Informing people that training, of any kind, needs to be implemented is generally met with dismay. While a full scale crm or lead generation tool training session may not be required, be sure that your primary sales tool has what is known as a “product champion’ or “evangelist”. Having an employee be an expert in your system will help direct others to learning the tool correctly, minimizing the possibility of data entry errors in your system.