Carpe Argentum"
(or ‘seize the revenue’)
By Stan Martin, CEO, Adroit Consulting
Increasing top-line growth requires proactive behavior by all who touch the customer. But they must be proactive together.
January 2004
Early signs of economic recovery are of little consolation to companies experiencing lackluster growth. Many reported improvements in earnings, however, are based on cost-cutting rather than revenue growth, making the old adage “You can’t save your way to prosperity” as relevant as ever. More troubling is the number of executives who do not foresee financial improvement until demand, and customers, return.
Waiting for customer demand to pick up may be an option for some companies, but driving top-line growth in such difficult times requires proactively identifying and exploiting opportunity – a time-honored idea captured by the Latin phrase carpe diem, or “seize the day.” After all, customers are still buying today, from someone. The challenge is to find them, and get them to buy from your company. Deciding to act, rather than wait for good fortune, might be thought of as ‘seizing the day’… but doing so profitably is better described by our own variation on that advice: carpe argentum, or “seize the revenue”.
Historically, as companies focused on improving top-line growth, or sales effectiveness, there were always the standard cures: A change in sales management; more sales reps; eliminating under-performing sales reps; compensation strategies; reorganizations; and the all-too-familiar sales training programs – Spin, Strategic Selling, Consultative Selling, and so on. While many of these tactics are appropriate in the right circumstances, in the era of carpe argentum we believe they do not go far enough – or may not cut it at all.
When traditional cures don’t work
A manufacturer recently responded to slack sales by implementing a major sales training initiative. As is often the case, they hired an outside firm to run a consultative sales training program. They were half-way through the program before realizing that their products did not really lend themselves to the consultative techniques offered in the course. In addition, they learned that more significant causes of lackluster revenues were high turnover in the field sales force, inconsistent compensation strategies, and a customer base that in many cases had not been actively contacted in recent times.
At another company, an assessment of sales effectiveness revealed that sales people were doing more managing and ‘fixing’ of customer service issues than actually selling. They were spending more time on the phone with internal resources than face time with prospects or customers! The root problem had nothing to do with sales skills or sales management, but rather the lack of integration between sales, customer service and re-seller partners in the channel.
Economically challenging times force companies to consider many responses. Rationalizing cost structures is typically at the top of the list, but there are also requests from sales management for more sales people, more products and price promotions, and the all-too-familiar ‘silver bullet’ of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology. In other companies, however, the management sentiment may be that much of the business environment is out of their control – a viewpoint that ignores the critical role of execution and cross-functional collaboration in sizing up additional market share and recovering lost ground. Narrow perspectives yield narrow cures for incorrectly diagnosed problems.
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