Who’s to blame?

Worried about the economy, interest rates, or layoffs in 2024?  Business Owners; if your company’s sales are down, who’s to blame?  

When companies miss their top line revenue and layoffs usually follow.  Not always though: 

Several years ago, a car dealer in St. Petersburg, Florida fired his entire sales force and sales went up twenty six percent. 

Rick Page 

If poor sales performance leads to layoffs, how do we address the problem?  Is it possible sales specialization to blame? 

I’m not a fan of today’s sales specialization or I would say “over specialization”.  It’s much more specialized than “back in my day”.  OK Gary… here it comes… tales from the Dark Ages again?  HaHa!  Fair enough, but hear me out. 

Thinking it’s too hard  aka “too expensive” to hire experienced sales professionals, many companies hire young, inexperienced reps.  They “promote” these new reps into entry level aka “specialized” roles after initial training.  Specialized aka “limited” responsibilities.  These inexperienced reps often perform lead generation/qualification activities on behalf of more senior, experienced sales reps who are also specialized by industry; by prospect size; by product line; or by some other, limited, assignment. 

These senior, experienced sales reps aka “Account Executives” specialize in lead-development and pipeline management aka “deals” vs. customers.  Worse, they’ve lost lead-generation skills aka “prospecting”.  AEs are supported by “Pre-Sales” or other “Subject Matter Experts”.  Lots of specialization going on here, true? 

Poor sales and the proverbial finger pointing begins.  Maybe Marketing is to blame.  Not enough Marketing Qualified Leads aka “MQLs”.  And the debate between marketing and sales continues… 

Some companies invest heavily in sales training and enablement.  So much emphasis that many sales reps - and their managers - don’t personally invest the time and effort it takes to truly become “trained”.  When any of these specialized reps fail, who’s to blame?  Sales training?  Sales reps?  Sales managers? 

Focusing for a moment on those young, inexperienced, new hires coupled with the Department of Unintended Consequences, sales managers receive these reps as “promotes” after their onboarding.  Since the sales manager is not responsible for recruiting, onboarding, and enabling their own sales people, sales managers don’t become skilled in these disciplines.  I ask again, when their sales team fails, who’s to blame?  Recruiting?  Human Resources? 

Then along comes the Account Management Organization; aka “Customer Success Reps”; aka “Farmers”.  AMO reps aren’t “Hunters” so they don’t develop lead-generation skills either.  (See a pattern here?)  Of course, AMO reps must deal with the dissatisfied customer who the AE over-sold.  Since specialized AEs don’t manage the new clients they just over-sold, they don’t develop those professional selling/relationship skills either.  Back to Rick Page: 

If we oversold or under delivered, then it wasn't a sale; it was a lie.  Lying is easy; selling is hard. 

Adding to the matter leaders often don’t inspect what they expect relying instead on that wonderful soundbite “delegate and trust”.  However, when sales performance slips that makes it impossible for them to determine – you guessed it - Who’s to blame? 

I wonder if sales specialization aka “splintering” is to blame.  Does all of today’s specialization get in the way of what the customer really wants?  Mahan Khalsa put it this way: 

Customers want to buy from a business person who sells. 

Sadly, in spite of customer preferences I fear sales specialization is here to stay; at least until the machines aka “AI” take over.  Except perhaps for St. Petersburg, Florida car dealerships. 

GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.