Great Sales Talent Drives the Elusive Top Line Growth
Consistent Top Line Revenue Growth is Challenging
Consistent and enduring organizational top line revenue growth has been elusive and rare. As organizations grow and mature, substantial revenue growth gets more challenging. Even exceptional brands find it difficult to maintain double-digit revenue growth beyond their early years of corporate development. Most successful organizations do figure out how to successfully squeeze ever more earnings to deliver to bottom line expectations. However, consistently driving the top line revenue growth has always been the more daunting business task.
Strategic initiatives and plans for consistently driving sustainable double-digit revenue growth are what most visionary CEOs want to see from their executive teams. In recent years, the most effective way companies have found to successfully accomplish top line growth has been through mergers and acquisitions. However, the potential value of that acquisition strategy has produced very mixed results and has not delivered on the promise of synergistic market growth.
Sound Business Fundamentals: Key to Sustained Growth
The most reliable and sustainable corporate growth seems to consistently generate from the basic and well-honed organic growth strategy. This simple growth recipe includes:
• sound and ethical business fundamentals and practices,
• taking amazingly care of your clients through passionate service, collaboration and partnership
• generating new clients through responsive and relevant consultative solutions to the ever-changing and complex market needs
• successfully delivering on the promise with effective services and solutions
• a willingness to try, learn, fail, own and repeat the cycle with humility in collaboration with their clients
• a high performing and responsive salesforce
Highly Effective Salespeople Produce Dramatically Higher Revenue
A very key factor in delivering on this strategy mentioned above is having a highly effective salesforce. In most organizations, there is a normal distribution of sales talent. Most companies have a limited number of high performers, a large group of steady performers and some lower performers that seem to constantly churn. This means that 20% of your sales performers delivers 80% of your sales. The “pareto effect” is alive and present.
In my experience, the highest performing organizations have more than their share of top sales people. Why is that? Are they just luckier in finding the top sales people? Or, do they take seriously the fact that every hiring decision is an intention decision to add another top performer to their high-performing sales team? Top organization know the value of talent and act intentionally upon that knowledge to acquire top talent.
In all my 35 years in working in and with great organizations, outstanding sales performers have proven so critical to those businesses’ success. In my experience, exceptional sales people have two very distinct things in common without exception:
• They are relentless in their pursuit of ever more clients and corresponding business and getting more business from their current clients.
• They are fearless in exploring new ideas and options with clients and prospects and pushing the envelope in building and ensuring their organizations deliver ever more effective solutions their clients and their markets require.
If organizations are genuinely serious about consistently growing their top line revenue, the most effective way is: 1) follow the fundamental business recipe above and 2) intentionally find and hire the top performing sales people who will work relentlessly and fearlessly to grow their business.
Great Sales Performers Aren’t Looking For Another Job
However, top sales performers aren’t posting for jobs or even aware of such postings. They are delivering consistently strong sales performance results for another organization. To find, attract, engage and acquire these passive top sales performers, organizations must explore viable methods of getting their employer value proposition in front of these extraordinary sales people. The powerful top line results which proven exceptionally talented and committed sales performers deliver is worth organizations exploring how to acquire more than their share of these high-impact sales performers.
