Lesson Learned #29
One of our past clients built a dominant company in a somewhat unattractive industry by creating what was essentially a sales company. He recruited and assembled the best salespeople from the fragmented industry, paid them a lot, and relegated production to a purely supplier role.(He also taught us a few things about buying – skinning us alive in purchasing our company’s services and somehow making us feel OK about the deal – but that’s another lesson learned.) His simple message was that salespeople are incredibly important to an organization. They can create and sell value that has nothing to do with manufacturing cost. They fuel a company. And while they have their faults, if you ever let the balance of cost in an organization shift from the people who create revenue to the people who spend revenue, you have a problem.
Treating salespeople with that kind of genuine reverence is hardly universal. “Sales” is often seen as a poor cousin to other more glamorous aspects of business. We have a continual stream of MBAs come through our recruiting channels, and we invest a great deal of time interviewing them. Not one of them has ever bragged about their ability to sell. Marketing maybe, but not selling. We hear all about people’s accumulated skills in counting money, trading money and investing money, but very little about generating money.
So while we may not have entirely understood our client’s actions many years ago, we have certainly come to appreciate the value of people who help create revenue. And we have also observed that as people progress in our business and in many of our clients’ companies, the ability to sell, or persuade others, becomes an increasingly critical capability.
