I want to emphasize an important distinction between Actual sales, and the sales department. Actual sales fix problems, the sales department may or may not be relevant to what causes that to happen.. although they will surely fight for the credit either way.
AFAIK Engineers have an axe to grind with the sales department, not actual sales. Giving credit for a sale is a very subjective matter, and more often than not every sales person who so much as sent an email to the opp want credit - effectively taking advantage of the subjective nature as much as they can get away with. Even if in reality the customer had to pretty much talk around everyone on the sales team and speak with an engineer to gain confidence in the product. Then the engineer has to go play catch-up from the 1 hour meeting while the sales member gets % of the sale.
Yes, but I feel this is somewhat of a tautology: of course lots of revenue makes things easier.
But the important part is to diagnose why you have low or declining sales. Sometimes it's because you don't have good sales people. But other times it's because the product you have isn't a good market fit, or it's really buggy, or your salespeople oversold and now your customers are unhappy with the actual functionality of your product.
I disagree, and that's why I responded. I've seen too many "we'll do whatever we need to do to get sales" turn into salespeople making unrealistic promises on impossibly tight deadlines.
So then the sale is made, but in a way that ends up destroying the long (and even medium) term health of the business. Product/engineering goes on a death march to get things done, by the end of it many of those folks are burnt out, customers are unhappy, and sales folks see the writing on the wall and are happy to bail with their fat commission.
It's like saying "do whatever you need to raise your stock price." There are healthy and unhealthy ways to do that, and the advice is useless if you don't carefully distinguish between the two.
So I think both of you are 'right', but you're choosing to interpret, and argue, the statement from different perspectives.
Sales are important. However, as you note, sales now should not come at the expense of sales later (or lead to returns later, or etc). And debugging low sales is non-trivial.
Focusing on sales to solve internal problems is like focusing on work to solve internal problems.
It can work to an extent, but sometimes you need to solve the internal problem before you can get the results you need.
So it's a feedback loop that leads to circular thinking. The problem is when we try to blame the external side of the feedback loop, to avoid seeing that our internal side is the problem.
I don't know... I might be having a reverse-survivor bias seeing, being in and contributing to failure, but I've _never_ seen a case where "let's increase our sales headcount" strategy actually did anything (EDIT: i.e. when things are bad. Of course, if things are good, sales is a key driver to growth)
If you need "more sales" to fix it, the problem often lies somewhere else.
>> I've _never_ seen a case where "let's increase our sales headcount" strategy actually did anything
no one said hire sales people; rather if you've got a problem, first look at increasing sales before you put your efforts elsewhere. This will either fix the problem or explicitly identify it.
The original comment which said "more sales"; I've never heard someone in business refer to salespersons with the cutesy "sales" so I don't think it's reasonable to think "more sales" refers to people, and if they meant a larger department they would have said "larger department", not "more (department)".
The comment below that also says "sales fixes everything", which, again, same logic as the original (and has the same author as two below where they clearly say "we're talking sales of things").
The comment below that is the only one clearly confusing sales people/department, with sales of things, "I don't think you can solve it with more sales people".
The comment you're directly responding to said "We're not talking about sales people or the department, we're talking about actual sales of things".
And you're saying someone, other than the person being corrected, 'clearly' meant the department or role? Nah.
Expressions like "A 20% increase in sales" are almost never used to describe an 20% increase in the sales department's headcount or budget. Most people would interpret that as a 20% increase in revenue from sales.
"Cost of Sales (COS)" in finance refers to the cost of making a sale, including all the costs required to produce the good or service sold, not just the compensation and other expenses associated with a sales department.
"Sales" as a noun does often refer to teh sales department, but there are times when it absolutely unambiguously means that, times when it almost never is interpreted as that, and times when it could go either way and a word like "revenue" would be clearer, but that doesn't make using the word" sales" to refer to revenue wrong.
I believe the word revenue was simply elided in this case. i.e., parse as “sales revenue.”
(I’m noticing elsewhere in this thread that others are interpreting “sales” as sales departments or salespeople. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, where the meaning of the plain word varies depending on where you live.)
OP here... I didn't realize how literally the words would be taken, so:
Few problems (a/k/a most problems) can be solved with more sales (a/k/a sales as a P&L line item equating to revenue); but OF COURSE its what you do with the increased revenue/sales that matters. Buying a Bentley isn't going to solve the business problem.
"Sales fixes everything" means that when you look at any random problem like "turnout is really big, how we can keep people for longer?"¹, often the fastest solution is to answer "hey, how can we increase sales?".
Answering that later question can lead you into any direction. Maybe you need more sales people, maybe your product sucks, maybe you must spend more on marketing. The point is not on how, the point is that the later one is the one goal you can have more impact on, and it will lead you into solving the former.
1 - On this case, with higher salaries, but there isn't enough money to increase them, thus the actionable question.
Corollary #1 - Marketing /sales is hard. Relative to tech / code it's at least 10x more difficult. Code / tech v human behaviour?? Which is easier to predict and sort out.
Corollary #2 - Nobody cares. You might love your baby (i.e., idea / product / startup) but nobody cares. At all. See Corollary #1 for more details.
