Imagine taking over a leadership role in a Company that was growing rapidly, had hundreds of high performance, high maintenance (though not necessarily correlated) sales professionals and was beceoming more and more unprofitable. I had this particular experience, and I can say we focused a huge amount of effort on fixing the front end. It was absolutely the right thing to do, but we did not focus enough attention on the back end. You don’t want to be the person in charge of the back end when the front end gets fixed and you did not keep up, because then it will be clear where the problem lies.

Obviously the inverse of this example is just as valid. The point being, the problem rarely lies just with sales or solely with finance, operations, etc. The key is to work collaboratively to improve all of the processes.

Glad I could proivde you with content. You make a number of good points. My comment was meant to point out that a weakness in any area of a business (front or back office) compromises the whole. And yes, the telco industry does seem to promote to “general mgr” from the sales organization primarily. Needless to say, most sales personnel doesn’t really understand the relationship b/w revenue, margins, and profitability.

You comments remind of the CLEC industry around the turn of the turn of the century when capital seemed to be free and unlimited (if you build it, they will come).

From what i have been able to observe via this blog, you seem to be building a truly different company at Zayo. It appears you have been able to build *awareness* about good business practices in an industry with very few. I don’t know anyone at Zayo, and I don’t have first-hand knowledge about your operations, but I predict you will do very well as an organization. I knew you were different when you started quoting Buffett!

You should have your own blog! You are articulate and your content is good. And you sneak some humor into it. Fantastic!

However, my “there’s always more than meets the eye” mind immediately jumps to a few places for discussion. Sales is driven by management with specific objectives defined by investors/boards/mgmt. Is the way most sales teams are evaluated causing the very demise you write about? Could it be that how the sales team is trained, motivated, paid, etc. generates the wrong behaviours? Or, at the end of the day, as I have heard in past lives, do front-end, quota retiring revenue numbers matter more than profitability to some? Is there a time/place where these should matter more? Other than being trained by a West Point Captain Sales VP that you will do good business–business that we will not be embarrassed of when it’s reviewed–does the way we judge sales teams in the industry today generate this behaviour that is unhealthy for the entire organization?

To add to that–from years of attending or coordinating “Sales Kick Off” events where inordinate amounts of time are spent on marketing downloads and internal process updates with weighty powerpoint decks (no offense Matt) and very little time educating sales on the applications, why the customer buys, what sets our network apart, constraints of the network to set the right stage with customers to help position issues with in advance, what information it takes to get an order through our company and why–and how not knowing one piece of critical information can kick us back to ground zero on timing, as well as what kind of deals are truly the most profitable and the most valuable (and for what reasons)–could it be that in general, we all need a little more clarity on the definition of sales success and just how we want to get there??? (sorry for the run on) I think the business is infinitely more successful when the sales people act and are trained like business owners rather than just sales people. We have to teach sales to be partners linked with the success and profitability of the business and not just the quota number. Sales people are reviewed religiously every 30 days–and rarely is one of the criteria that they did good business if they didn’t meet their numbers.

Finally–on the flip side, to be the devil’s advocate a bit. We all know one of the most common (and lame) excuse from sales for not selling is price. I think we would have to be careful on the side of delivery/back office that we don’t fall into the trap of the most common excuse for not delivering service being that sales did it wrong. Could this become the newly accepted excuse that hides the fact that the company doesn’t have an organized process for product delivery (which falls in product management) or a solid, educated project management organization for delivering service (which falls in service delivery/CPM org) or for that matter even a qualified sales training program that enables sales to sell the deals we want? What if the process for back office is truly broken or non-existent? How do we really get to the bottom of the whole “the buck stops here” dilemma and leave pointing fingers behind?

I’m cursed (or blessed) with a twisted mind that believes even the most profound discoveries could have layers upon layers of to sort through in order to make the organization better. I truly both agree with your post today and yet believe there is more than meets the eye. How can we use what we discover here in this world to improve upon our own?