A sales manager told me recently that her team hadn't won a new customer since March, and in the same breath said they'd never been busier.

Both things were true. Nobody had planned it that way. The same four people owned new business and existing accounts, and whenever a big customer called with a problem, the prospecting got pushed to next week. Which, in a busy month, meant it got pushed to never.

I thought about her team when I read about Go Local Wholesale's plans this week.

The employee-owned wholesaler, which used to trade as Parfetts, is growing its retail team from 55 people to 75, according to Talking Retail's report on the expansion, published on 10th November. That's a 36% increase in one go. And the brief for those people is a big one, covering support for more than 2,000 existing stores while helping the business recruit around 500 new ones every year.

Two thousand shops to keep, five hundred to win

The ambition behind it isn't small either. Talking Retail reports a target of 3,000 symbol stores within two years, with turnover climbing from £807m to £1bn within three. Its retail development advisors work directly with shopkeepers on ranging, promotions, merchandising and store development.

Go Local's joint managing director, Guy Swindell, made the point himself in the same report, saying that growth has to be backed by the right level of support and that a bigger team means more time spent in stores.

I like that he said it out loud. Plenty of businesses set a growth number and then expect the people already looking after customers to find the new ones too, in whatever gaps are left between everything else.

Why is looking after accounts a different job from winning new ones?

Account management rewards patience, a long memory and the habit of turning up when nothing is wrong. New business rewards a thick skin and a tolerance for being ignored, because most first approaches go nowhere. The two can live in one person, but they rarely get equal effort, and the existing customer almost always wins the fight for that person's week.

Ask anyone who has done both.

A customer with a problem is loud, urgent and already paying you. But a prospect is quiet and can wait, or at least it feels that way, right up until the quarter ends and the new business figure is nowhere near where it should be. And by then the gap is too big to close in a fortnight.

I've watched good salespeople wear themselves out trying to do both properly.

How many accounts can one person look after?

There's no fixed number, because it depends on what each account needs. Using the figures Talking Retail published, 55 people across 2,000 stores works out at something like 36 stores each at Go Local, and 75 across 3,000 comes to about 40. Those are my sums, not the company's.

And they leave out the time it takes to bring 500 new stores a year into the group. Onboarding a new account is heavy going, and the first few months take far more visits, advice and patience than a settled customer ever does.

Which is why a headcount figure on its own tells you very little.

Should you hire a business development manager or a key account manager first?

Hire for the side that's weakest, and be honest about which one that is. If existing customers are drifting, a strong key account manager protects revenue you already have. And if the pipeline is thin and the accounts are stable, a business development manager will do more good. Hunting for one person who's brilliant at both usually means paying for a unicorn and getting a horse.

I'd add one thing.

The hire you make second matters nearly as much as the first. Once a business has both a hunter and a farmer, somebody has to decide which accounts get handed over and when, and that's a management job. It's often the moment a business realises it needs a sales manager or a head of sales, and not another pair of hands.

What gets lost when one team does everything?

Mostly the new business, and it isn't the people's fault. When the same person carries both jobs, the commission scheme decides which one gets attention, and most schemes pay on revenue, which existing customers produce faster. The prospecting slides first because nobody is paid to protect it.

Go Local is at least growing from a strong position, with Talking Retail reporting that turnover rose 10.6% to £807m in a record year and that staff were paid the maximum annual sales bonus of 10%.

Being employee-owned, the business can share a result like that with the people who produced it, which gives a retail team a decent reason to care about the new stores as well as the old ones.

Who should own the split?

Somebody senior, and ideally somebody who has run both sides. A head of sales who has only ever farmed accounts will tend to protect the existing book. One who has only hunted will chase new logos and let the base go cold.

Neither is wrong, exactly.

But the person setting targets has to understand what each kind of work costs in time, and the job market isn't making that person easy to find. The KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs, as covered by People Management, found that permanent placements fell in October for the first time in four months, even as the number of available candidates rose for the 44th month running.

Plenty of CVs about, then, and fewer firms hiring. Yet sales leaders who can build a team around two different jobs are still scarce, and they're rarely the ones answering adverts. Most questions I get about how to hire key account managers turn out to be about exactly that, the structure above the role and who'll run it.

A client we placed an account executive with recently had the same gap from the other side, with nobody owning the conversation once a project was delivered, and you can read about how that account executive hire came together.

How do you split the work without losing either side?

Decide which side each new hire will own, and write it down before the advert goes out. Set targets that match the job, so a farmer isn't judged on new logos and a hunter isn't buried in service calls. Then agree who manages the handover between them.

It sounds obvious.

And it is, until you're the one with 500 new stores to bring in and a phone that won't stop ringing about the 2,000 you already have. Go Local has at least named both jobs in public. Most businesses never get that far, and then wonder why the new business figure never moves.

That sales manager has since split her team in two, one pair looking after customers and one pair chasing new ones, and she tells me the first new account in months has just signed.

Before you add headcount to a team that's quietly doing two jobs at once, talk to our sales recruitment specialists about which of those jobs your next hire should own.