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Celebrating Successes: The Power Of Compliments
Years ago, when I was new in management circles, a veteran administrator decided to share his self-described secret of success. He said: You have to be careful, Bill. I*ve learned not to compliment my people. Makes them too self-assured, and...
Five Dirt Cheap Ways to Increase Sales in Your Cleaning Business
Whenever a person is starting a cleaning business or looking to
grow their business certain questions usually come up. How can I
do it inexpensively? What are the most effective methods? Since
most janitorial work is done after hours this leaves...
Five Tips for Analyzing an Income Statement
In today's article, we’ll be looking at the income statement, which is the most deceptively simple of the major financial statements. I say simple because it’s just a list of all the revenue, minus all the expenses, to calculate what’s left over...
Managing Your Business’ Cash Flow
You wouldn’t drive a car without a gas gauge or speedometer, and if you’re driving on an empty tank, you won’t get very far. Then why would you make financial decisions without the proper tools? Businesses must master controlling the flow of...
Public Relations – Defining Your Organization from the Inside Out
What do your customers say about your company?
Would you let your major competitor control your sales strategy?
Public relations is an inevitable consequence of being in business. Whether you like it or not, your corporate image evolves...
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Don't Shoot the Sales Team
Revenue is down. Sales are slowing. The CEO looks up from the business plan and realizes that the company won’t meet analysts’ expectations. Focusing on the organization’s sales leader, the stage is set for sacrificing a scapegoat.
Upon who else should the axe fall when the sales organization misses revenue targets? After all, aren’t sales and revenue the responsibility of the sales leader? The answer may be as easily forgotten as it is obvious.
To one degree or another everyone in an organization impacts the revenue generating process. The strategic plan of the board of directors and the CEO provides the overall strategy for revenue generation. The marketing department provides crucial demographic and psychographic customer or client information on which the sales department relies in formulating industry and account strategies. Manufacturing, finance, legal, customer service and all other departments facilitate or constrain the process of generating revenue, each in their own peculiar way.
The sales organization’s influence in enterprise revenue generation is con-centrated in the sales pipeline. Identifying bona fide sales opportunities, managing those opportunities through the sales pipeline until they produce revenue, and then managing customer or client relationships are the primary responsibilities of the sales and sales management teams. Rarely, if ever, does the sales organization control the resources of manufacturing, marketing, finance, legal and customer service.
The picture most companies present to the world show the sales organization “out there,” in front of customers and clients and in front of the rest of the company’s departments. Even marketing, the first cousin of sales, is more
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often than not as disconnected from sales as are the other departments. The sales group leads the company charge, and the other departments take up rear support positions, providing tangible and intangible support.
Revenue generation is a cross functional, company-wide process that involves every department and all employees in the organization. The CEO and the Board of Directors set corporate strategy and everyone else in the organization executes that strategy. We have never observed a situation where the sales organization is in disarray while all the other business segments are humming along with little or no friction. In those rare cases where the failure or underperformance of an enterprise’s revenue generation process lies within the sales organization, the appropriate sales executives, managers and sales professionals should be held accountable and should suffer the requisite consequences. Before CEO’s shoot their sales teams, however, they might want to take a critical look at the entire revenue generation process and how each business segment contributes to or detracts from the success of the process. Like America’s favorite psychologist, Dr. Phil, would advise: Every department in an organization either contributes to the company’s revenue generation process or contaminates it.
About the author:
About the Author:
Steve Chriest is the founder of Selling Up™, a sales consulting firm specializing in sales improvement for organizations of all types and sizes in a variety of industries. He is also the author of Executive Focus, a book that details a plan and methodology for engaging with senior executives.
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