Whilst this is a question that has been thrown around board rooms for years, for me, the answer remains absolute and fundamentally integral to the success of any business, YES!
This doesn’t simply mean all staff needs to be the next Joe Girard overnight but it does mean that everyone should understand the importance of sales and also the importance of building relationships using their own sales ability.
Sales-focused businesses will be constantly growing, evolving, and coming up with new, smarter, more efficient, and cost-effective ways to work, providing the end client with a better service and final product. If the sales-focused business was a car, the sales-focused employee would be the engine, powering the company along. If the employees within these businesses are not sales orientated and focused on delivering these improvements, another company will be and the customers will follow.
Putting emphasis on sales doesn’t mean all your employees need to start making outbound calls, or hard selling to your customers. The way people do business has changed. Sales focus needs to be on meeting and exceeding customer needs, understanding customers, and adding value which means they wouldn’t consider using anyone else. By having everyone committed to customer focus, you can position your business as unique.
If a business itself is not sales-focused, the business is likely to shrink in size, lose customers or become stagnant and get left behind by the competition.
For Wolfestone Group, being sales-focused is a driving force and has served to help us continue to grow over the last six years within the extremely competitive translation services industry where clients are demanding more for less. By investing heavily in technology, staff, and training to make sure that we are able to be at the leading end of the market and add value for our clients. This wouldn’t have been possible if we did not have the sales-focused team we have spotting the gaps and potential improvements.
In short, a sales-orientated employee is a valuable asset to any business that considers itself commercially focused and wants to be or remain successful in these current tough and competitive economic climates.
