Everybody knows Sales, right?

Everybody knows Salespeople – they’re everywhere, and everybody thinks they know what Salespeople do. Now your experience with Salespeople probably depends on what sort of experiences you’ve had with them. Everybody’s got a Bad Car Salesperson experience, and a boring Insurance Salesperson experience and I’m pretty sure nobody likes telemarketers. Having been in Sales for a really long time, I dislike sleazy Sales folks as much as, maybe more than, the next guy. But if you deal with professional Salespeople in your working life you know that Sales is what makes the business world go ‘round.

In business, the problem is that everybody knows Salespeople, but very few people who aren’t in Sales don’t know what Salespeople really do. Since, as someone much smarter than me once said, “Nothing happens in business until someone sells something”, not knowing how that happens is a problem.

If you went to Business School, you learned about lots of interesting things and one of those things was Revenue (often referred to as the “Top Line”) and obviously, Profit (the “Bottom Line”) and one of the big items between those two Lines is something called the “Cost of Sales”. Now your Salesforce isn’t all of that line item but it can be, and usually is, a big chunk. My question (and Tom Peter’s question and a bunch of other folks question) is – since the Sales job is both the major driver of Revenue and a large chunk of Cost, how come they don’t take more time explaining what, exactly, the job of Sales is? And I don’t mean “the job of Sales is to produce Revenue”, I mean “what do Salespeople do and how does one help them better produce Revenue”. I mean if, as a businessperson, your job is to maximize Revenue & Profits, how can you not know, intimately, how those things are produced?

This blog is an outline of a textbook that will attempt to rectify some of the shortcomings of the b-school curriculum by providing a firm appreciation of what Salespeople bring to an organization.

Because, like it or not, businesses live or die by the sales force.