Growth doesn’t come from sales. You can’t grow your business through your sales organization. Sales is not a growth engine. Sales is the accelerant or the amplifier. Sales takes what you have and amplifies it to your customers. If you don’t have good products, sales isn’t going to help you. If you are in a declining industry, sales isn’t going to help you grow. If the organization is bureaucratic and has inefficient processes, sales can’t help you. Sales doesn’t help you grow. Sales takes the things that will help you grow and makes them grow bigger and faster.

Too many companies look to their sales organization for growth. They look at their numbers and say we need to grow by 10% and then pass that number to the sales team. And why not? It’s easy to do. The sales team has the apparent numbers. They actually bring in the revenue. What’s missing in this approach is the sales team has very little to do with operations. They don’t build the products. They don’t create the processes. They don’t build the business models. Sales takes what you have to market.

If you want to grow your business don’t look to sales. To grow your business look at your products, are they a quantum leap above your competitors products? Look to customer service, do you provide an industry leading customer experience? Look to your market, are you the only player in a growing niche market or are you just another player in mature market. To grow, look at operations. Is your company efficient in it’s use of capital. Are you easy to do business with? Are you the markets first choice? To grow, look to your employees. Do they like working for you? Do you have the most talented people in your industry? Is your company, the company people are clamoring to work for? If you want to grow your business look to these things. Stop looking at sales.

If you want to grow your business, don’t look at sales, look at everything else. Once you’ve done that, take it to sales and ask: “what can you do with this”.

If you have the right sales team, the answer should be, “We could blow it up!” like any good accelerant.