Have you ever noticed all the top 10 lists on magazine covers – such as the top 10 beaches in the world or the top 10 mistakes people make in their financial planning? Even David Letterman does a regular segment on his show featuring the top 10. 

But there is only one reason why businesses fail.  And that is: not enough sales.

Businesses often spend more time and focus on other areas of the business than the core of the business which is sales.  Companies instead will concentrate on developing their “brand” or image with printed materials and websites.  Management gets caught up in having a “process” for everything.  Sales people demand their own individual business cards and are worried about expense accounts.  But the one thing CEOs, company presidents and business owners overlook, and this seems to be universal with most businesses, is they forget to sell something. 

When business is on a downturn, as many businesses are experiencing right now with the ongoing recession and economic meltdown, business people are always looking at laying people off, cutting expenses, maybe even setting a policy on reducing the use of the copier.  But how much time do they really spend on looking at the company’s sales cycle and sales methods, how sales people are trained or even consider hiring additional sales staff? 

Most business people, when I ask them how many sales calls the sales people made, they can’t tell me.  Somehow the sales force has convinced them that filling out a daily report is micro-managing them.  How dare the CEO, president or owner of the company ask the sales people what they did that day to create business!   

Sales people will say things like: ‘I don’t do quantity, I do quality’.  Which translates into:  ‘I worked 2-3 hours today and spent a great deal of time at the coffee shop with other sales people bragging about our sales triumphs’. 

During business times when the economy is more stable and growing, sales management should be tracking prospect calls, sales calls, and sales results on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.  But during these tough economic times, it even becomes more critical to know what the sales force is doing.  Hold weekly sales meetings.  Call sales people during day when they may be in the car between appointments or doing paperwork.  Make sales people accountable.  Their job title is sales.  Not excuses.  They may have to double, even triple, their sales efforts.  Even read a few books on sales, listen to audio CDs or downloads or attend seminars to sharpen up sales techniques.  But they need to become professional sales people particularly in this brutal economy which we will be facing over the next couple of years, if not longer.

If you want your sales department to succeed, which means the company succeeds, you need to become the consumate professional sales manager.  Even if you have a sales manager, you still need to supervise the sales department.  Sales people should be selling the customer.  Not selling you on why they aren’t selling.  There is no excuse.  The company’s very survival depends on what your sales people are doing.