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Sales does not depend on personal relationships.
This comes from Justin Roff Marsh who says:
Salespeople’s personal relationships add value to the extent that the organization is operationally dysfunctional….
Operational dysfunction is just a simple way of stating that an organization doesn’t keep its promises. Or, to be more blunt, that it tells lies. It doesn’t deliver on time or it delivers defective products (or services)—which is the same as failing to deliver on time.
(This is part of his radical approach to reorganizing the sales process in a company. You can find his post about it HERE)
If you can't deliver on time then a customer will use their relationship with the sales people to pressure them to move their order to the front of the schedule. If this works, it makes the schedule even more dysfunctional. If they can count on the schedule working as promised, then the customer's relationship with your company is commercial not personal. Increasingly, especially with younger customers, they prefer commercial relationships over personal ones with companies they buy from. This is why more and more sales are happening online.
It's Bigger Than Your Sales System
But I think his point has larger ramifications than just the sales system. Every output in your company and every system that produces those outputs must be representative of reality. If you misrepresent reality either people will invent their own workarounds to your systems (which won't be repeatable and scalable) or they'll lie.
Your marketing messages are outputs that should accurately reflect what benefit your customers will gain from your products. If not, customers will quickly learn you can't be trusted and they'll go elsewhere.
Your production systems must accurately reflect the time and costs involved in making your product or service. If your costs are off, you won't make a profit. If your timing is off you won't deliver what customers expect.
Your hiring process is essentially a sales process with a different focus. If what you communicate to prospects is not what they find when they get hired, they won't stay.
Management must support people to do their best work and do work that's meaningful to the company. Leaders must be willing to give accurate feedback both positive and negative. (I find that positive feedback is easy to overlook.) Without accurate feedback and meaningful work, morale decreases along with employee engagement and productivity.
All Your Systems Must be Based in Reality.
I won't list all the systems a company needs. I've done that elsewhere. Suffice it to say that finance must accurately predict cash flow or you'll run out of cash. Information must be readily accessible and it must be accurate or people will perform poorly. Goals and plans must have assumptions built into them about how the future is expected to play out. This way, if the goals are in danger of not being achieved, you can determine whether the cause is lack of proper execution or life unfolded in ways you did not foresee.
Only when your systems are based in reality, can your company fully exploit its business model to generate maximum profit.