You Are First and Foremost a Sales Organization

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Your company is not a manufacturer. Your company is a sales organization that happens to manufacture whatever it is you sell.

Your company doesn’t design software. Your company is a sales organization that happens to design software.

Your company isn’t an industrial engineering firm. It is a sales organization that happens to sell industrial engineering and design.

Sales cannot be allowed to be an afterthought. It isn’t a necessary evil, and it cannot be treated as if it were. Many business fail because they invest more time, energy, and money in their information technology, their finance and accounting, and their administrative departments than they do in sales. They don’t believe that the entire company is a sales organization first and foremost.

On a smaller level, I know countless individuals who could be valuable to other people because of their great expertise but, because they refuse to think of themselves as salespeople first and foremost, they have no clients.

How Would You Be Transformed?

How different would your company look if everyone believed and behaved as if you were a sales organization first and foremost?

What would your company feel like to your clients and customers if everyone in the organization were aligned around the goal of acquiring, serving, and retaining your clients? How would your execution change? How would your support change? How would the whole experience of dealing with your company change, and how would your client’s notice this change?

What if the belief that you are a really a sales organization started in executive management and extended all the way through finance, information technology, operations, and your administrative roles? How would these departments and roles be changed by that belief? How might they behave differently if creating value for clients was at their heart of their efforts?

What would the product, service, or solutions that you sell look like if everyone responsible for designing and executing for your clients and customers believed it was their role to help sell it?

How would your company be transformed if investments of time and money that are often made elsewhere were made in sales instead?

Those of us in sales sometimes like to think of sales as the engine. But in reality, an engine doesn’t run on one piston. There isn’t enough power generated by one piston acting alone. Your company is first and foremost a sales organization.