Sales is everything. Really?

(3 minutes read)

Most salespeople think they are the essential part of the company and all other functions, such as finance, marketing, HR, and operations, exist because people are selling. They believe that without sales, the company cannot exist, and it is partly true. The company cannot live without sales, but it can’t exist only with sales, either.  All other support functions are vital for sales to live. Therefore, it is useless for salespeople to snub their colleagues and think they are “the king”. 

On the other hand, when those support functions operate with too many complex rules and processes, it can be very constraining for the sales.  Thus there is a strong need for cooperation, and lack of cooperation kills productivity.

 According to Yves Morieux from Boston Consulting Group, there are two approaches to increase cooperation. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MD4Ymjyc2I)  In the “hard approach” we add new functions and processes to address the cooperation problem. Yet it creates additional complexity. In the “soft approach” we want to develop relationships and make people like each other for better cooperation. That does not work either because when people like each other, they do not produce enough tension to use the resources in the most optimum way. On the contrary, due to lack of challenge, they use more resources.

Those two approaches are obsolete today.  Morieux comes up with a new approach that he calls “The 6 rules of simplicity” to boost cooperation in an organization.

  • Understand what people do:

Beyond boxes, job descriptions… understand what they do beyond the surface. For example, if you do not know what precisely a logistics agent does and how this role makes the life of salespeople easier, you cannot find any common ground to ask for cooperation.  Thus, your sales team cannot benefit from this role to improve performance.

  • Reinforce integrators:

Integrators are managers who have an interest in making others cooperate.  They are mostly transversal roles (such as sales enablement roles, strategic marketing…) working with different functions to move their projects forward.  To do so, we need to remove layers and rules to give more discretionary power to managers by holding them accountable.

  • Increase the total quantity of power: 

Empower people to use their judgment and intelligence.  Empowerment is the keyword here.  We must empower people and provide security so that they can take the risk of cooperation.  Suppose a logistics agent is scared to lose his/her job due to a simple mistake. In that case, he/she will not take the initiative to fast-track the shipment to a critical customer without approval from the hierarchy. Create a blame-free environment by defining the boundry conditions clearly.

  • Extend the shadow of the future: 

Create feedback loops and expose people to the potential consequences of their actions.  When the logistics agent does not risk fast-tracking a critical shipment, the company can lose a crucial account with massive potential.

  • Increase the reciprocity:

Remove buffers.  Make people to see the impact of their actions.  Let people feel obliged to cooperate and create direct communication to find the optimum way to cooperate. Remove the processes that hold the logistics agent and the salesperson to call each other to organize this critical shipment.  All useless processes and buffers just provide dysfunctional self-sufficiency so that you can lose this customer “successfully”.

  • Reward those who cooperate:

Create incentive plans for the support roles that are related to the success of the sales teams.  Same for the sales teams… you can easily build cross-functional KPIs for the sales teams. (Ex: Cash collection)

To sum up, it is useless to treat salespeople like heroes, and they are just a part of the system in the company and cannot exist alone, just like other roles.  The critical question is how you create an organization encouraging cooperation for the sales teams’ success.  Those six points mentioned above are easier to say than implement. Yet, this is where the success of a business lies.