Company Growth | A Sales Guy

The Hardest Part of Business; Getting Real

The hardest part of business is getting real. Getting real is being honest, truthful, and accurate about what is going on in your company, with your employees, the market, and your products. It’s confronting the reality of your business. It’s seeing your business for what it really is, not as you’d like it to be.

Getting real is difficult. It is unpopular, painful, political, and uncomfortable. It takes courage, humility and a willingness to be critical.

If we can’t get real with what’s going on, execution becomes impossible. Growing the business, defeating the competition, improving margins, being innovative, surviving a recession requires we confront reality.

Getting real is hard. We don’t like to think we hired the wrong people, or built the wrong product. It’s hard to accept a new competitor is building a better product and taking our customers. It’s frustrating to know our supply chain is anything but “real-time”. It is painful to know we’ve made poor decisions; decisions that haven’t been the best for the company. But, we have to. Success depends on it.

Most of us become defensive when asked to face reality. We deflect, defend, and argue. Rarely is ownership taken. No one wants to be THAT guy or work for that company. The reality is, we are ALL that guy and we ALL work for that company. That’s the first reality to accept. Everything/everyone isn’t going right today and everything/everyone won’t be right tomorrow. Accept it, take ownership, be honest, make the right change and move on.

The only thing worse than not accepting reality are the results from not doing so. By not getting real, we don’t make enemies in the office, and we remain in our comfort zones. When we don’t confront reality, we don’t have to call our baby ugly and that feels good.

Just because we don’t call our baby ugly doesn’t mean it’s not. Don’t deny and defend, get real and confront reality. The rest becomes easier.

April 8, 2010 | Filed under: Business Performance,Leadership | View Comments |

Is Sales Responsible for A Companies Growth – Conclusion

Who is responsible for a companies growth has been a popular topic on this blog and in the SalesBlogCast group I belong to on LinkedIn. There have been lots of opinions and comments on this topic; almost 100 in the LinkedIn group. We also tackled this question on Tuesday’s Sales Smack call.

The conclusion; sales is NOT responsible for a companies growth, everyone is.

Growth comes from a plan and a clear understanding of how you’re going to grow. The leadership team is responsible for this. The leadership team needs to set the direction and build the growth plan, then everyone is responsible for execution, including sales.

Everyone has a role in a companies growth. Sales is responsible for revenue. Marketing is responsible for awareness and lead generation. Product is responsible for creating compelling, industry leading products. Finance is responsible for managing the growth, the debt, cashflow etc. Everyone has a role in the overall plan. Targeting one group for growth will fail.

All too often companies look to only one functional group for growth. Many times that’s the sales team. Sometimes it’s product, other times it’s marketing. Pulling only one functional lever won’t grow a company. You need them all.

For a company to grow, leadership needs to develop a growth plan. They need to outline where growth is coming from, what products will drive the growth, what investments will be made and where and why (the assumptions) they believe the growth can be had. With the plan in hand, sales, marketing, finance, product, customer service, HR, comes together and executes.

You can YANK on the sales lever. It will get more revenue, but it’s only temporary. It won’t grow the company.

Company growth isn’t the actions of a few, but the effort of many. Company growth starts with leadership and ends with sales and everyone else.

How is growth achieved in your company? Do you have a growth plan?

When to ramp sales (beyondvc.com)
How To Create Measurable Objectives (altitudebranding.com)

January 14, 2010 | Filed under: Business Performance,Leadership | View Comments |

Growth Doesn’t Come From Sales, Part II

Five months ago I wrote a post arguing that a companies growth doesn’t come from sales. You can read it here. I read it again today and believe it just as much now as I did then. Sales isn’t responsible for growth. Sales is an accelerant. You can’t live without sales, but if you rely on sales to grow your business you’re toast.

The post has created a lot of conversation on LinkedIn back when I wrote it. For some reason, over the last two days the conversation has started up again and the folks have had some great thoughts on the idea of who is responsible for a companies growth. LinkedIn’s comments are closed, so I thought I’d bring them here. These are some of the best:

Great Post, and I agree, sales is not solely responsible for a company’s growth. There are many people who think sales people are that powerful. We’re not. In the same way no sales person (or sales team) should ever take full credit for a company’s success, they can’t bear the blame either for slow or declining growth. -Lilly Ferrick

Revenue generation is truly a company responsibility. -Walter Wise

I will take a great sales team with a mediocre product any day over a poor sales team with great product—any day. I have a team right now who complains “we don’t have anything unique to sell–our competition has the same stuff.” To which I reply–is there really a difference between the cell companies, or auto dealers selling the same brand, or RiteAid vs. CVS vs. Walgreens, or any printing company, or Dell vs. Compaq etc? In almost every market, true differentiation is in minutes, not degrees (go back to trigonometry). Sales is what finds those in the market who need or want that tiny difference and exploit it into significant profits and many times it is the sales person him or herself which is the only minute difference. -Jeffrey Bowe

The discussion appears to be quite interesting. But before moving forward the first question that should be addressed first is- What exactly do we mean when we say a “company’s growth”. So breaking up the question into two parts is required in my view. So we’ll have two questions now- What do we mean by Company’s growth and second what is Sales responsible for? Correct me if i am wrong but i feel this is a better way of addressing the topic. How? Here i go…When we talk about a company’s growth we normally mean an organization’s growth in terms of revenue and bottom line. Although i agree that growth means a lot of other things. So now, whom does an organization entrust the responsibility of bringing in revenues and bottom line growth? Thats Sales. And this also answers the second question i.e.,”what is Sales responsible for?” So when an organization decides on its growth strategies and fixes on a goal/objective for a year it does it in terms of X% growth figure to reach X figure of revenue & bottom line. So, these figures and percentage growth that does define an organization’s growth is driven through sales. Sales gives a true picture of an organization’s presence in the market, it takes a customer’s voice to boardrooms and its a real time test of an organization’s capability to understand and respond to market’s needs. So apart from being a catalyst for external growth it also ensures growth within. -Avinash M

Sales is the only process in an enterprise that creates revenue.

Sales provides the foundation for growth but that’s not enough – the rest of the enterprise must play their part to ensure that the products and services delivered are competitive and that the costs (of production, loans and sales etc) are kept down so that a healthy profit is turned – it is the profits that are earned which provide the collateral for growth and a talented management team will invest them wisely for sustainable growth. -Steve Dobson

This is my favorite. I agree with Yashwanth, sales is more responsible for growth when it comes to start-ups. Great insight.

During the initial stages of the company, sales is largely responsible for growth. A company might have the best product or might offer the best service, but the survival solely depends on how much and how fast they sell. This determines whether they move to the next stage of growth where processes play a key role.

But the biggest factor that is responsible for any company’s growth is innovation in all key areas – Creating products, marketing them, creating sales strategies, managing customers, etc.

But Sales is largely responsible for ensuring a startup moves on to the growth stage. -Yashwanth Madhusudan

What do you think? Is sales responsible for a companies growth?

December 29, 2009 | Filed under: Business Performance,Customer Service,Sales Process,The Chase | View Comments |

Compliance Isn’t The Culture You Want

I had great conversation with one of our HR leads the other day. It was about the establishment of culture. I’ve always been a huge advocate that culture is at the core of any successful company and at the demise of unsuccessful companies. One of my favorite books is Built to Last by Jim Collins.

One of things we agreed on in our conversation was, as leaders in a company the most difficult piece of establishing or changing a culture is the execution. It was in this discussion that it occurred to me. A true culture is one based on CHOICE not on COMPLIANCE. This is a very, very thin line.

As leaders we desire particular behaviors with in our organizations. We embrace these behaviors as critical to developing the working environment to success. The difficulty comes in how we are able to achieve them.

Getting our employees to comply with our expectations for behavior is NOT a successful culture. Although our employees may be behaving as desired, they are doing so out of compliance. Compliance lacks choice with ownership.

It’s not compliance we are looking for in culture. It’s acceptance and ownership that the behaviors requested are good for the employee AND the company. This “opt-in” approach can not be mandated it can only be influenced.

The end game in changing or developing a new culture isn’t; are the employees behaving the way we want but rather have they bought into the behaviors and believe for themselves that those behaviors are the appropriate behaviors to demonstrate. In other words, are they complying with your demands or have they chosen for themselves?

I get it, these are very close, BUT the outcomes and execution strategies are very different. If you want compliance, then firing or moving out those that don’t comply is a critical component of the culture and the execution strategy. There are substantial punitive actions for those who don’t behave accordingly. In a culture where behaviors are derived out of compliance, the culture is intricately pinned to leadership. The culture then becomes dependent on leaderships ability to hold the employees accountable. When culture is created through compliance it is never owned by the general employees therefore is rarely reinforced by the employees. It is a top down culture.

A choice driven culture is created through influence, positive reinforcement, demonstration, not be edict. The execution strategy of an opt-in requires participation and acceptance of the entire organization. It starts with the executives demonstrating the behaviors themselves. EX: you don’t say your culture is about operational efficiency, yet have a policy that executives get suites when they travel. You don’t say you are a data centric organization but ignore the data when a sales person uses it effectively to explain why their number can NOT be achieved or why a product can not make the launch date.

Developing an opt-in culture starts with consistent demonstration of the desired behaviors from the top down. Creating an opt-in culture requires constant and expressive celebration and reward of the people who most exhibit the desired behaviors. If your company desires risk taking then those that do must be celebrated, regardless of success or failure.

Execution of an opt-in culture is much like social media. It takes heavy engagement, especially from leadership. It requires continuous feedback. It requires use of viral communication tools so the success stories can be easily shared and moved throughout the company. It requires more reward than punishment. It requires celebration.

How do you know if you have an opt-in culture? You’ll know if the employees become the owners, propagating amongst themselves with little to no involvement from leadership and there will be a plethora of stories of heroism; stories of employees going above and beyond to build and preserve THEIR culture.

How will you know if you have a compliance culture. You have a compliance culture if more of your time is spent punishing. If there are few rank and file leaders promoting it and there are few if any stories of heroism circulating the company.

It’s not what people do that makes the culture, it’s why they do it.

Don’t get me wrong. Compliance is a culture, but is it the culture you want?

November 6, 2009 | Filed under: Business Performance,Leadership | View Comments |