Is the Salesman the king of your company?

R&D or development

R&D or development needs to design and develop the products.
They can explore different methods or systems to obtain the aimed goal of the solution or product.

Production use of resources

Production has to build the products or solutions according the design at the best price and with the least use of resources or optimize the use of the available resources.

Marketing to communicate

Marketing sends out their communication message aimed at a certain group of people. Their messages can be received by the potential customers, but also by many other people.
Marketing has the advantage to test their messages during small trials.

Marketing is about spreading the word, distributing information and generating interest.
Marketing is about addressing large numbers of people, where one person more or less isn’t that important.
Marketing is part of the preparation part of the sales cycle.

Sales needs to score alone

In sales the building of relations and communications are to be personalized and adjusted to the moment, circumstances and conditions.
The salesman needs to be spot-on with his communication. He has not much room for error.
Still the salesman can adjust his message during his conversation with the different people involved. This allows for some kind of freedom the salesman has during the sales process.

Selling is about direct or face to face communication moving to the goal of closing a deal.
During this process the Salesman is in most cases left on his own, with no fall back on other departments.

The Salesman needs to close

Sales is about:
- Retaining the interest of the lead
- Defining the problem to be solved
- Bringing, serving and positioning the solution
- Convincing the proposed solution is the best suited
- Converting leads into sales (into money)

As in the picture: the man is trying to sell products made by crafted people and he needs to convince the tourists to buy. If he fails, all the people relying upon him will fail too.

In the end it is the salesman, who closes the deal and makes the company operate.
The future of the company depends on him – everyday.
Thus the entire company should be helping and serving the Salesman in order to close deals or bring more sales to the company.

This would make the Salesmen the most important people in the company.
Would this make the Salesman king of the company?

What is the status of the Salesmen in your company?