Sales-Centric or Corporate Soldier?
Place Your Bets
“Place your bets
I’ll place mine now.”
from Hiding Neath My Umbrella by God Help the Girl
For me, there is no alternative for a company or an individual to being sales-centric.
If you want your business to grow, all parts of the organization have to be focused on selling, and there is no room for “corporate” behavior. Very few products or services sell themselves. There are scenarios where it is seemingly the case: government regulations prescribing the use or products hyped by social media like the Impossible Burger. In each case, though, sales are the result of extensive (marketing) work to generate demand drivers.
And even if your title does not include "sales," you are selling.
First, you are selling yourself as an individual, and you are also selling your work product: flawless accounting, compliant HR work, or dependable procurement. And lastly, any function in the company has to ask themselves every day, what can I do, how can I change, to allow us to sell more. There are so many things: great code, a clean work environment, responsive customer service, or happy coworkers; they all help a business to sell more.
Consequently, in my playbook, sales-centricity is the best and only orientation a successful company can have. Winning new customers results in the growth companies aspire, and the entire organization (not just sales) works towards that goal. Sales-centric organizations also have a larger share of their teamwork in commercial functions like sales, customer service, or marketing.
Susan Walsh describes it perfectly: “It takes an entire cast of like-minded individuals to make a sales-centric organization work properly. By definition, a sales-centric organization is focused on two objectives: meeting sales numbers and increasing market share.
These two objectives take priority over any other consideration and provide permission to do whatever it takes to achieve them. In other words, everyone in the organization is supporting the sales activities. It takes sales associates with a hunter mentality, supportive managers who understand how to motivate and reward their teams for working together, and a CEO who is very focused on sales.”
What is the opposite of being sales-centric: sales-ignoring or sales-oblivious? Or is the opposite of sales-centric being customer-centric? Lior Arussy seems to think so as he states: “Sales-centric organizations put all their emphasis on the sales process and provide salespeople with explicit or implicit permission to do “whatever it takes” to make a sale. This attitude is what leads salespeople to treat customers as wallets or human ATM ...”
I think that sales-centric and customer-centric are inherently the same. In today’s transparent markets, one cannot sell without putting the customer front and center. Simply put, salespeople work to understand customer needs and then sell solutions that address those.
Reading Mission Statements from companies all around the world reflects this. Almost all of them refer to the customer or client as a stakeholder the company aims to serve / do good for / make a difference.
The opposite of sales-centric is a corporate mindset or being company-centric. Rob Wint correctly states that “although organizations have long touted the idea that “the customer comes first,” the number of enterprises that can truly be described as customer-centric is smaller than most people would think. Many companies have a view of how customers perceive them, but that view may not be in alignment with how customers really see the company.”
Company-centric organizations also suffer from omphaloskepsis, the preoccupation with themselves to the exclusion of everything else. Every internally oriented department - Finance, HR, Planning, Operations – outweighs Sales. Way more time and energy are spent internally than with customers. While the commercial staff is reduced, corporate functions staff up.
I sometimes use the term Corporate Soldier to describe a person in that type of organization. The Corporate Soldier knows all the rules and regulations that govern the organization. All the entitlements, the written and unwritten does and don’ts. They know them all.
And all their actions are driven by and based on those rules. It is a comfortable environment to navigate. It does not require original thinking, there is always a justification, and CYA and righteousness are built-in. Everything seems to make 'sense.'
You may think: Great. Perfect employee. Well, not in my view. A corporate soldier lacks everything that makes an organization sales-centric: Creativity; Initiative; Dynamism; Originality. They are not an entrepreneur, not a business builder.
I am with Steve Swasey, VP at Healthline Media, who said, "rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers. People do their best work when they’re unencumbered. If you’re spending a lot of time accounting for the time you’re spending, that’s time you’re not innovating.”
Organizations! Get rid of your corporate soldiers and become sales-centric.
What is your organization like?
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Lior Arussy – Sales Centric Organizations – Selling Despite the Customers
Rob Wint – Company-Centric Versus Customer-Centric: What Camp Are You In?
Susan Walsh - Implementing Sales Centricity Into Sales Organizations is a Must
Daniel Miessler – Anatomy of the Corporate Soldier
Brad Paul – Corporate Soldier versus Entrepreneur
Alex Hanson – Corporate Soldier
Matthew E. May – Want To Make Your Environment More Creative? Kill Some Rules.
Photo by Anne Gosewehr