Knowledge
When weak sales are not the sales department’s problem
The owner of a medium-sized service company tells me that in two years he has already replaced three heads of sales. Each time, the first quarter was better. Then the results flattened out and later started to fall. That in turn was the signal to start a new recruitment process. In total he spent about half a million on recruitment and salaries. Sales results did not change dramatically, and the salespeople’s activities still lacked repeatability.
I ask what he agreed with those directors, and he says: on a specific target. But when I asked why he believed such a target was realistic, he could not really answer.
The second question turned out to be more important than the first.
In many companies sales are treated as a separate entity. There is a sales department, there are targets and settlements. If the result does not add up, the problem is looked for right there, in the people and their effectiveness. And for a while that makes sense, because at an early stage the company really does rest on the individual talents and methods of its salespeople.
The problem starts when the company grows, and the owner keeps looking at sales with the same assumptions and expectations as at the beginning.
Salespeople each work in their own way. Each has their own approach, their own idea of how to go to market, their own arguments, their own conversation style. Some deliver, others do not. The owner looks at the numbers and pushes. More calls, more meetings, more reports. Recruitment. Training. A new CRM. A change to the commission system.
And sales are still not stable.
Because from a certain scale, the sales result stops being a function of what the salespeople do. It becomes a function of which key decisions the owner made before the salesperson ever picked up the phone. Whom the company wants to sell to. What exactly it sells. Why the client should buy from us in particular. What the decision process looks like on the client’s side, and whether anyone in the company has described it at all. In general, whether there is a sales strategy and described, proven methods of working that can be replicated.
If these and other things are not clear, no salesperson will deliver the result repeatably. They may have individual successes. But it is not their job to build a sales system.
Trying to solve this by changing people seemingly works, but only for a moment. The new head of sales comes in with their energy, their network, their experience. For the first quarter it looks good. Then they start bouncing off the same wall the previous one bounced off. Because it could not be seen from the outside.
This is the classic signal that the problem lies not in execution but in construction. That is exactly the conclusion we often reach when we do a B2B sales audit.
The breakthrough comes when the owner starts asking a different question. Not “why are the salespeople not selling”, but “have we created the conditions in which sales can work”. Not “who dropped the ball”, but “what in our model causes these deals not to close”.
These are hard questions, because the answer to them is unpleasant. It means that the responsibility that was for years assigned to the sales department has to be moved one floor up. To the people who like to see themselves as strategists, not as the bottleneck of sales.
But until that happens, every next personnel change in sales will be more of a cost than an investment.
In a mature company, building the sales system should not be pushed onto salespeople, or even sales directors. They are there to manage and execute what already works well. The key decisions about building an environment in which specific results are realistic belong to the key people: the owners, the board.
If you are wondering what level sales in your company are really at, you can take a quick sales maturity diagnosis (in Polish) yourself. It shows which of the four levels your organization operates at today. That is the starting point of a conversation that sooner or later has to happen anyway.
