Below five million in annual recurring revenue, a hotel tech company cannot afford an organisation chart copied from a larger SaaS business. There are not enough deals to keep specialists busy, and hospitality adds its own constraints: seasonal buying, owners who want one point of contact, and a go-live that decides whether the customer stays.

This framework replaces job titles with jobs. It sets out the four jobs every hospitality sales team has to cover, shows who should hold each one at three stages of growth, and gives five rules for deciding the next hire.

The four jobs

Whatever the team is called, four things have to happen for revenue to arrive and stay.

• Open. Starting conversations with the right properties through outbound, referrals, events, partner introductions and inbound follow-up.

• Close. Running the evaluation: discovery, demo, proposal, the migration question and the owner's sign-off.

• Land. Getting the property live and using the product through its first weeks.

• Keep. Renewals, expansion to more modules or properties, and referrals.

In a large company each job is a department. Under five million, the question is how few people can cover all four well, and which job is being neglected.

Who holds each job at each stage

The revenue bands below are guides, not thresholds. Move on when the description fits, not when the number does.

Two things in the table are deliberate. Opening and closing stay with the same person throughout, and landing gets a dedicated owner before selling gets a second seller. The founder also leaves the four jobs in a set order: landing first, then opening, then closing, and keeping last, because the largest accounts still expect to hear from the person who sold them. The five rules explain why.

The five rules

Rule 1: Keep opening and closing together

The standard SaaS model splits prospecting and closing between two roles. In hospitality that handoff costs more than it saves at this size. Hoteliers buy from people they trust, and the trust built in the first conversation is lost when a stranger runs the demo. Deal volumes are also too low to keep a separate prospecting role productive. A full-cycle seller who opens and closes their own deals is the default until volume clearly exceeds what they can handle.

Rule 2: Hire for landing before a second seller

The first hire after the first seller should usually own onboarding. A second seller adds deals. An onboarding owner protects the ones already signed, frees the first seller from implementation calls and produces the reference customers that make the next deals easier. Much early churn traces back to the go-live period, as covered in why hotel tech churn is an onboarding problem in disguise.

Rule 3: Split by segment, not by territory

When there are two or three sellers, divide them by type of buyer before geography. Selling to an independent owner and selling to a group or management company are different jobs with different cycles, stakeholders and proof, as set out in the difference between selling to a hotel and selling to a hotel group. A seller who handles both does each one less well. If you serve only one segment, keep the team whole and share accounts by workload.

Rule 4: Plan capacity around the season

Hotel buying is uneven through the year. Decisions and go-lives cluster in the quieter months, and peak season slows both. Size the team for the busy buying window, and use the slow one for the work that gets skipped: customer visits, case studies, pipeline clean-up and training. A team that looks slightly overstaffed in peak season is usually the right size for the rest of the year.

Rule 5: Add a sales leader last

A head of sales is often the first senior hire founders want and the last one they need. Until the motion is repeatable there is nothing to lead, and an experienced manager without a working process will import one from their previous company. The founder should remain the sales leader until two sellers are hitting target using a documented process. The reasoning is the same as in your first go-to-market hire in hotel tech.

How to apply the framework

1. Write the four jobs across a page and put a name under each one.

2. Mark any job with no name, or with the founder's name there by default.

3. Compare your page with the stage table and note where you differ, and whether the difference is a choice or an accident.

4. Identify which of the four jobs is costing the most revenue today.

5. Make that job your next hire or reassignment, ahead of the title you had in mind.

Structure follows the leak

The right structure at this size is the smallest one that covers all four jobs without the founder as the default owner of each. Most teams under five million are not short of salespeople. They are short of someone accountable for one of the jobs, usually landing or keeping, and the cost shows up as churn and stalled expansion, not as missed sales targets.

If you are not sure which job is leaking the most, the 12-point leak audit takes about twenty minutes and ranks demand, conversion, activation and retention on your own numbers.

Frequently Asked Questions