Summary.
Every one of your salespeople will tell you that the customer is king. Sometimes, they’ll mean it, and that’s usually a good thing. If you press them, your salespeople may even tell you that the district or regional manager is king, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. The problems come when your salespeople aren’t quite sure who their boss is. Their confusion could be a sign that your company’s sales force controls—the various policies and practices that define the way you manage your sales team—are in conflict with one another. In researching sales and sales force dynamics over two decades, we’ve found that this misalignment invariably creates problems in sales functions. As salespeople struggle to resolve or work around the conflicts within the system, the consequences mount—first affecting individuals, then spreading to the entire sales force, and eventually hobbling the whole organization. Over time, the sales force begins losing its best people. Turnover rates soar. One European multinational we studied had lost half its salespeople in its home market every year for five years. Even if a company isn’t in such obviously dire straits, it may still be leaving a lot of money on the table.