Until a sale is made, all a business is doing is burning through cash. Once a sale is made, that sale can generate a profit if the costs incurred to deliver the sale are less than the customer’s amount to be paid.
The hard reality is that a completed sale isn’t completed until payment is received for that sale. Too many salespeople don’t care about the downstream consequences of the sales they make. They view themselves as too busy chasing after the next sale to worry about whether the company got paid for their last sale at a profit. Accountable salespeople recognize that the sales process isn’t completed until the customer payment is in the bank.
Overview
In the start-up phase, ownership is going to be highly involved across all sales, ops, and finance. When sales managers are brought in to help the owner get work, they will begin to let go of the following accountabilities for sales:
- Sales Process Management
- Sales Quotas and Targets
- Prospecting
- New Business Development
- Bid Prep + Submittal
- Sales Contracts
- Customer Relationship Management
- Customer Follow-up
- Develop Referral Base
- Sales Activity Reports
- Revenue Forecasting
- Sales Policy Compliance
The question to ask yourself about sales as you delegate each of the above responsibilities is: “Am I going to delegate the accountability for the result as well, or am I going to hold onto that?” If you want to be accountable for Net Sales, then you are delegating responsibility for the actions to be performed because you are holding onto the authority over those actions.
Actions with only responsibility but no authority mean that all you can do is hold your manager responsible for doing the action or not. You can’t hold them accountable for the results of a responsibility if you don’t give them the authority to shape the actions required to produce the planned result.
