Why Sales Gets Blamed When Strategy Fails
Execution absorbs the blame for upstream mistakes
When growth slows, leadership rarely questions strategy.
They look at sales.
Pipeline is examined.
Conversion rates are reviewed.
Activity levels are discussed.
Forecasts are challenged.
Sales becomes the investigation.
The Comfortable Place to Look
Sales is visible.
More importantly, it is comfortable.
Sales metrics create the impression that revenue becomes predictable through effort.
Calls.
Meetings.
Opportunities.
Close rates.
The math appears rational.
If 400 calls produced one deal, then 1,200 calls should produce three.
That reasoning would work if markets operated on linear effort.
They do not.
The Metrics We Choose
Sales activity is easy to measure.
Buying decisions are not.
Organizations manage the metrics they can see.
Activity dashboards expand.
Pipeline targets increase.
Sales processes become more structured.
The organization feels more in control.
The buying decision remains unchanged.
The Responsibility of the Company
Companies have a responsibility to make selling simple.
Simple selling comes from reducing friction in the buying process.
When the decision is simple, sales can do its job.
When the decision becomes difficult, vendor effort rises as buyer momentum falls.
Who Controls What
Sales owns activity.
The buyer owns the decision.
Sales can explain value.
Sales can guide evaluation.
Sales can build rapport.
The decision still belongs to the buyer.
When the buying process is difficult, sales effort rises while buyer momentum falls.
Sales feels this resistance first.
The Pattern
Organizations respond by adjusting sales.
New targets.
New incentives.
New leadership.
Activity increases.
Market behavior stays the same.
The constraint was never sales.
The constraint was the difficulty of the buying decision.
Next
Companies eventually recognize the strategy problem.
What they do next is often surprising.
They hire leaders who look almost exactly like the ones they already have.
The next post explores why organizations repeatedly hire “experience twins” and how that decision reinforces the same strategic blind spots.