Crane - The Sales Focused CEO:: Looking at Business Through a New Lens

Companies fear looking at changes or improvements to their sales forces for good reason: sales is the engine that drives revenue. No matter how patched up or sputtering that engine may be, the thought of overhauling it fills CEOs and senior executives with dread. To keep revenue flowing, companies will make ongoing, piecemeal repairs as long as they can. They will tolerate behavior and performance that would not be tolerated in any other areas of the business.

At a certain point in time in the life cycle of any company, changes or improvements need to be made to the sales and marketing area of a business. The world is not static, and sales and marketing organizations cannot be allowed to stagnate and operate in their now-primitive business processes. The sales business, in particular, has become the last frontier for people to address in business improvement. Fear of the unknown, and the use of the wrong lens to view the business, are the greatest barriers to overcome.

CEOs have traditionally relied on being presented with reports of financial information on organizational performance. Each report demonstrates performance against the previous year and the year-to-date to allow for making comparisons and seeing whether improvements have been achieved. These CEOs are flying blind, since they attempt to relate the financial report to the strategy theyve set in place for the company. Financial information about real sales organization performance can be dangerously misleading. When a company is experiencing a drop in sales, traditional financial statements can understate the seriousness of the situation. Having a strategy that is more sophisticated than merely relying on financial reports can allow your company to steer clear before any indicators appear that there is trouble ahead. In fact, according to research by strategist Dan Prosser, only 13 percent of companies deliver strategy.

The first step for any CEO is to be empowered with knowledge of how the sales and marketing business should function, and dispose of any of the myths and legacies that work in opposition to delivering that strategy. Most information that people expose themselves to is written by sales leaders for sales leaders. It is narrow in content and focuses on compensation plans, training, and ingenuous reporting; all support the mystique of the sales business. Marketing cannot become a more open and transparent area of the business until reporting in a meaningful manner is a requirement.

This book is written by a CEO for CEOs, and is based on more than twenty-five years of consulting with CEOs in business turnarounds and improvement. It looks at the broader demands of business that you as a CEO must deal with; it establishes the thinking you require and the new lens you need to view the sales and marketing business. In short, it assists you in becoming what I refer to as a sales focused CEO.

Sales focused CEOs delve deeper into critical detail, driving growth and removing any barriers that stop strategy execution. They embrace business improvement and may gain value from lean principles in their businesses. As CEOs, they rely less on the sales leaders verbal representations and traditional reporting and place more emphasis on fact-based information, which provides a rich and steady view of both the present and the future. They do not follow the grand theory of everything that you read about in business journals; they have learned that the detail is critical, and they apply different drivers for their business that will ensure that strategy execution is achieved.

Sales are the make and break for most companies, and comes with high risk. When performing well, sales remains the untouched frontier. When things go wrong, howeverusually for a sustained period of timeit becomes necessary to take action. The person in charge of managing one of the highest risks for most companies is an underperforming sales leaderone who is frequently an immovable person who has wrapped him- or herself in mystique and has a connection with the most important element of business: the customer. Only when armed with the knowledge and confidence of how this business unit should operate does anyone take steps to address these shortcomings. In order to mitigate risks, sales focused CEOs embrace business processes and disciplines that will give them immediate transparency deep inside the business.

Through the process of improvement, the sales focused CEO views sales and marketing like any other area of the company. Lean principles transcend into sales and marketing business when applied correctly. This is not a matter of the sales process, but rather the business of sales and the business of marketing. The principles that are applied free up capacity, thus removing excessive operating costs associated with sales, reducing fixed costs, and providing the ability to maximize profit. The productivity of the sales and marketing organization becomes focused, streamlined, and effective.