by: Steve Chriest

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 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.