The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function

by Justin Roff-Marsh

Management encourages salespeople to operate autonomously. Salespeople proceed from the assumption that more sales is always better (they figure the rest of the organization will keep up somehow). On average, the sales team as a whole may well sell less than the organization has the capacity to produce. However, because new accounts are won infrequently, the load on the rest of the organization is irregular. On the occasions that customer service, engineering, or production does not have the capacity to honor the (often optimistic) commitments made by salespeople, on-time performance is compromised and salespeople attempt to placate upset customers with even more optimistic promises. The resulting chaos reduces the organization’s effective production capacity.