I like your idea of ‘everyone should sell’ but to make it work it is essential to have a workforce that is the best. It is only the best that can truly multitask no matter what function they are in: admin, techincal, sales..
As you have so rightly said: Pare down the workforce to the best and then hire only the best.

One important addition I would like to make: be clear on your goals. Too often companies get confused. The MD will understand sales growth is required but sales growth in core competencies should only be focused on in these bleak and growing bleaker times.

And ultimately, a lot of process inefficiencies/ deficiencies can be overcome with inspirational leadership. A good leader, as Confucius said, is one who has the confidence of his people.

A good article!

Dan

Different strategies work for different companies. Obviously the implementation depends a lot on the culture, the processes you have established and the business you are in.

1. For us cold calling is a well oiled process with clear mesgs, qualified databases and performance metrics. The end goal is to fix up a meeting with the relevant customer stakeholder for the on field sales person and schedule follow-up meetings, not necessarily to sell the service. The idea behind shifting some admin folks to sales is to increase the number of leads/ meetings for the on field sales team. By also fixing follow-up meetings they free up more time for the sales guys to actually think about the meeting and not the logistics of the meeting.
Obviously this strategy does not work for specialized sales. It works only for something where the value prop is crystal clear and the skills can be easily taught.

2. All companies whether professional or not, need to adopt innovative strategies to come out strong in a downturn. Branding something as “mom and pop” and hence not professional is premature. On any day, I would rather be a “Mom-and-pop” shop and survive the downturn rather then be “professional” and go bankrupt. As long as I am not doing anything illegal, I am very happy to be a profitable “mom-and-pop” business.

3. I think that employees are far more mature than we give them credit for. If you are very transparent about the situation and communicate with them on a regular basis, people are more than happy to “help out”. In fact for us, the pollination between technical and sales is working out much better than expected.

4. Anyway the idea behind ” everyone should sell” is much more fundamental. At a very fundamental level, a business exists to make money. Whether you sell computers or sell dosas at the street corner, the idea is to create wealth. If you take that as the objective, its very clear that everyone should focus on “making money” - and sales is at the forefront of that. When things are bad everyone should be focused on the core objective only.

Vamsi.

all your ideas are good and worth implementing but,i dont think i would buy your idea of “Everyone Should Sell”.

I am surprised to read this because professional companies dont indulge in such a practice.When we recruit a person we have defined KRA’s in mind and suitable employees are thus selected.

Now when you say Admin and others will do sales calling etc there are many inherent problems with this.

1.Employees dont expect this change in function which is completely off their skills,hence they do the job because of pressure of losing job which in turn will effect the quality.

2.Employees carry a negative impression of the organization and tend to brand the company as mom and pop store and there are chances that this will be shared with others and will be known slowly in the market which is a negative aspect for the image of the company.

3.Skills of Admin will not be sales oriented,By giving sales responsibilites to them the message being sent out is sales can be done by anyone,unfortunately i have seen this mentality by a lot of organizations (one of my past employer had this attitude of shifting people into sales function which proved to be counter productive).The truth is sales needs a methodical and logical approach and is not a skill which can be done by anyone and everyone.

I would rather ask all the employees to take a reduction in their salaries by citing the problems whatsoever rather than shifting people into functions they are not skilled.

Regards

Vizay