Why sales should be the last to know

Salespeople have two roles; ‘selling and ‘not selling’.

Ask any salesperson and they’ll tell you that a huge slice of their time is spent on ‘not selling’ activities.

Some of this time is spent on reporting, some on admin, some on internal meetings and yes, as in all departments, some of it is just frittered away.

But in many – and I’d even venture to say most companies – a large chunk of time is spent:

• Working out where to sell that product
• Working out how to sell that service
• Finding or (more likely) creating sales tools and materials
• Dealing with post-sale processes that don’t fit

It isn’t sales’ job to work out how to sell the product. It’s not their role to create supporting materials. They shouldn’t have to deal with post-order admin.

Which is why I say sales should be the last to know.

Don’t pass a product across until you have everything nailed down.

The how to sell it, who to sell it to, the tools, pricing, collateral, repeatable processes and so on and so forth.

If you don’t get the entire internal package right you’ll end up with a sales team that gets discouraged, starts to sell anywhere, puts the wrong messages out to the market and finally brings in problems rather than profits.

And it’ll be your fault, not theirs.

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