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Who gets the blame when revenue targets aren’t met? If you answered, “the sales team,” keep reading; we’ve got a radical restructuring of today’s upside down corporate philosophy we want to sell you.

Would your kid sister do a better job explaining your products than the “whiz kid” that Marketing sent out to meet with your national account? Could you write a better RFP response in the pouring rain than the support team did after six weeks and $50,000 of mandated intra-company chargebacks?

In the final stages of a brutal negotiation does your legal team put their phone on “call forward” and their PDA’s on “out-of-office?” On the sales you do muscle through the door, does it take client services months to set them up so you can start the booked revenue clock?

All companies depend on sales, but very few are organized around sales as the central, strategic, raison d’être for the organization and its clients. Sales is viewed as the gang that can’t shoot straight. “We’ve got the best products in the industry and those rubes can’t sell ground corn to a feedlot.” Slip even a little and you’re in the bottom 10% that companies are always churning and burning out of their organizations, even if the worst are doing better than 90% of the competitor’s best.

The entire organization needs to be refocused around sales as the voice of the customer and sales as the critical determinant of the company’s value. Every client interaction becomes a listening post that shapes the design, value, and pricing of your company’s products and services. Every win or loss becomes an opportunity to focus marketing dollars in ways that quantitatively help drive sales. Marketing departments should be filled with analytical geniuses, not party planners.

The average B2B sales person is bringing in $500 to $1,000 an hour in new revenue, should their time be wasted chasing administrivia or optimized for as much client face-time as possible? An organization with its processes organized and optimized around creating extraordinary value for customers and clients is the one that will succeed.

The sales force, as the front line voice for the customer’s perception of value, must be the canary in the coal mine, the harbinger of future success or failure. Every day, every process and person must be looking for new ways to keep that canary alive.

Copyright 2008, Lotus Pond Media