In a previous vent, I stated that “Sales” was one of the great “Corporate Evils”…
Now, obviously, I don’t mean “sales”, the reason for being in business in the first place… I mean “Sales” the department charged with ensuring that “sales” occur at all.
But, in accepting their raison d’être, as an essential corporate premise, I continue to struggle with the basis requirement that they need handling with kid gloves!
The two areas of business who don’t seem in anyway phased by whether the company has delivered to the customer any service whatsoever seem to be “Sales” and “Finance.”
Take Finance (please, will someone take Finance… !), they are totally introspectively business-focussed (in my experience). Bean counters, they look into every aspect of the monies in and out of the business and make arcane plans and forecasts for other financial people, to compare notes and talk about gearing, liquidity ratios and “market cap.”
Someone very close to me has recently started out in software sales, and it remains a personal disappointment to me on a scale hard to verbalise. He now uses such phrases as “I’m looking align myself…” I’ve already promised myself I’ll slap him if (when, more like!) I hear him use the word “synergies.”
My trouble is I berate myself for maintaining a halcyon belief that “Sales” can actually be normal and productive people who are capable of doing something for the business that places them behind either the customer and/or the business itself; because, primarily sales people sell for themselves, not the business and certainly not the customer.
And further, I struggle to comprehend how or why this group of misfits, miscreants and mismatched people needs to set itself up and run itself with scant regard for the rest of the business; as if they’re a breed apart and can be allowed to govern and arbitrate themselves as some form of elite, special forces regiment that stands outside the usual governance of the rest of the organisation.
Honestly, there’s nothing special about them; but, oh my lord!, do some of them think there is!!