Daily Leadership Thought #87 – Focus on The Outside (Sales) and The Inside Will Follow
Every business must build a scalable and repeatable sales process. If “cash is king,” then “sales must be queen (or a co-monarch).”
Much of our success is based on our ability to fully understand the business environment outside our organization. Many leaders spend far too much time tinkering with their organization’s internal operations (often when their sales stagnate or fail). The bottom line is that unless there is consistent and reliable sales activity, internal operations will be a challenge anyway. There are very few expense problems that a revenue solution can’t solve, and minimal revenue problems that an expense solution will fix long-term.
Working outside your company and consistently selling your products/services is much harder work than tinkering internally. It forces you to constantly build new relationships and put yourself out there. This means that you must be prepared to face rejection, which can occur on a daily basis. It makes you deal with the dynamic realities of the marketplace rather than the more controllable environment of your internal operations. It requires you to accept the truth about your business decisions, rather than hiding from or rationalizing them. There is no better test of an organization’s business future than its ability to attract new clients and penetrate new markets.
Most leaders I know would get better results if they spent more time looking outside their organization for opportunities and seizing them rather than worrying about what may or may not happen once the deal is done. Your job is to continually stress your operational capacity to redefine what’s possible. You must stay abreast of current events and take proactive steps to adapt accordingly. Hire talented people and hold them accountable for ensuring the internal delivery systems work effectively once the sale is made.
Stress your organization from the outside in, not the inside out.
Related articles
- When CEOs Make Sales Calls (hbr.org)
- CEOs, It’s Time to Talk About Sales and Customer Success Alignment (thinkgrowth.org)
- Radical management: it’s happening! (blogs.forbes.com)
- Guest Blog: Mapping Your Business Development Goals—10 Tips (promcoblog.wordpress.com)
