Jun 17th, 2015 - Category: Sales
Lars Dalgaard is a name you probably haven’t heard before. I certainly hadn’t until I read his article in TechCrunch “To Clean Up Your Startup’s B.S., Bring Sales Into The Leadership Team.” Even though I didn’t know him, the article grabbed my attention so I dug a little deeper and it immediately became clear that Lars is a heavy hitter in the business world. He sold his last company, Success Factors, to SAP for $3.4 billion and now he is on the board of Zenefits, one of the fastest growing business services startups in history.
So if Lars disagrees with labelling salespeople ”coin operated idiots,” smart people should pay attention. This quote from the article says it all:
In addition to bringing the actual bacon - in the form of paying customers that make everything work - salespeople are the one group constantly in front of the very people you’re selling to. They can visualize the market like no one else, help build the go-to-market strategy, and give you intimate customer and competitive insights for the overall company strategy.
But as one business owner told me the other day, when he asked a group of salespeople what features should be added to his products, the answers were all over the map, and none of them seemed to be linked to actual revenue opportunities. The problem was the lack of a filter: a mechanism to identify, evaluate, and implement the best of the valuable suggestions into product enhancements.
Great salespeople are like race cars. They are focused on one primary goal and as Lars says, they “think, live, and breathe customers all day, every day.” So take 10 minutes and read the entire article, it is a fascinating glimpse into how a super successful CEO has leveraged his sales team into a major competitive advantage. Like a race car, salespeople can be a challenge to manage. They have too much energy for most people, but if you want to win the race, your safe, reliable Honda Civic ain’t gonna cut it. Sales needs to be included in your product development process. As an added benefit, you get a powerful, free measurement system, but that’s a topic for a future post.