Edit Re: Sales Slump? Do You Have the Right Resources Assigned?

Dino...

Your comments are accurate and your recommendations are right on. When it comes to having the right resource, its starts at the top and begins with the right leadership.

Each of us has a different experience with why business owners and even corporate managers and executives struggle with this whole concept of sales versus marketing. My experience with my clients follows:

- A number of marketing executives have been promoted from other functions and have very little sales or marketing experience. Not a good move in good times and a real business killer in a down economy!
- Other marketing executives have great marketing experience but no real sales knowledge. Half a loaf is better than none.
- Some marketing execs have great sales experience but no real marketing background. Still half a loaf.

Any combination of the previous means that there is a gap between the person's insights and ability to manage their position. In all fairness, some of these executives are fast studies and overcome their liabilities quickly. But this is the exception to the rule as many others demonstrate little interest in bridging such gaps and often mismanage their marketing roles, as a result.

Over the last three decades I have met far too many small and big business executives and managers who wrongly thought they understood sales and marketing, when in fact their knowledge was skin-deep at best, and sometimes totally erroneous.

Easiest way to determine their understanding is to ask them to define each function as it applies to their companies. Their answers reveal a lot about their understanding of these functions. Their actions, planning processes, programs, response times and even hiring practices reveal even more.

Yes, there are some great, knowledgeable and forward thinking sales and marketing executives as well as business owners. But for each one of these professionals, there are many more who are getting their employers into trouble.

Good times help mask an amateurs' inadequacies. However, down times quickly reveal how poorly prepared sales or marketing execs and managers are by their:

- Ability to recognize coming changes, challenges and possible options or solutions
- Response, or lack of response, to new challenges
- Willingness to deal with their new realities BEFORE these realities impact their employers
- Ability to delegate and get others into a proactive role
- Ability to inspire confidence in those who rely upon their decisions
- Ability to get needed and timely results

An old adage challenges us to think about whether the times makes the person or the person makes the times. When it comes to sales, marketing, customer service and management: It helps to know your job before you accept it because in a down economy there is often little time for error and almost no time for on-the-job training. Why? Because others livelihoods and families are depending on these managers' and execs' decisions and right actions.

Andoni Lizardy
Management, marketing and sales services professional