If the priority is growth, why don’t we actually talk ‘selling’?

Now, it’s a truism that business likes stability, and hates uncertainty.  And we’ve had a lot of uncertainty lately, most recently a long, drawn-out ‘pitch roll’ for the new Chancellor’s big day.

The recent Reeves Budget has few vociferous fans in the business community, but at least its contents can now be factored into your planning.

That means it doesn’t matter if your 2025 prognosis is discouraging or if you are filled with new optimism. It is time to focus on growth.  That means prioritising sales at arguably, the relative expense of everything else. Obvious, right? After all, that’s what growing a business means.

So how come so many 2020s businesses seem to lack urgency and focus, regarding selling?

Business Insider Midlands Sales Summit, a breakfast briefing and panel debate, was this month.  To hear about the realities of actually selling products and services, less than two dozen turned up. Of which 6 were panel members.

With Kurt Jacobs, the editor, afterwards, I suggested that this was typical of my experience lately. It has felt strangely difficult to get C-suite clients off highly-manageable, internal issues like culture, HR, environmental responsibility etc, and onto the thorny question of ‘who is going to buy from us’? Here’s a clue. AI easily provides a summary of reports, by McKinsey,  PwC and Gartner, into their clients’ recent corporate priorities, as follows.

“2020: COVID-19 forced crisis management onto leaders, who focused on business continuity and employee safety. Sales growth became a secondary priority as companies pivoted to remote work and restructured their operations….

2021: While sales growth remained a goal, C-suite priorities included resilience building, employee mental health, and DEI…..Leaders also began emphasizing digital transformation to strengthen against future disruptions.

2022: Sales growth and customer experience regained priority as businesses pursued pandemic recovery. However, these were coupled with strong green commitments as pressure increased to address climate impact. Leaders also emphasized agility in their workforces and processes….

2023: Priorities included AI integration for efficiency, customer personalization, and operational automation. ‘Sales growth’ persisted as a top goal, but was often viewed through the lens of innovation and customer engagement….

2024: AI and technology took centre stage, influencing C-suite strategies for productivity and growth. Sales growth remains critical but is increasingly seen as dependent on digital and AI-enhanced customer interactions….”

Notice all the implied, long-term work streams required before selling may commence? Notice, also, how each year new strategic priorities have emerged to be linked with the sales effort.

Certainly, we at Catalyst can confirm that there’s been a lot of distraction lately. We’ve met the Sales & Marketing director who spent 18 months doing nothing but ‘ops’, in the pandemic. And the CMO who confided that “panicking about  A.I. has sucked all the oxygen out of the room.”

Dan Barlow is Group CEO of Kagool, an international IT consultancy he founded in 2004, in our region. He agrees there’s been a problem.

“Dashboard level focus for our UK customers has been mainly on business continuity planning, cost reduction, employee retention and other reactionary events. This has moved focus away from more strategic and foundational KPIs like sales”.

Noticing this tendency as early as 2022, Kagool took drastic action, opening overseas offices in territories like Dubai where sales growth was an easier conversation to get into.  Meanwhile, back home, three months of speculation and pitch-rolling for the Reeves Budget feel like the latest reason, in many boardrooms, to settle for ‘wait-and-see’ sales priority and timid marketing budgets.

Of course, many UK companies have had to reallocate budget to energy costs, raised input prices and wage costs.

Nonetheless it’s quite possible boardroom culture in the UK is settling into a self fulfilling, ‘steady as she goes’ mentality. Easing back on sales could become permanent, if we aren’t careful.

How do you turn this around? Well, one way might be to get better engagement between those who make the big decisions and the people out there pushing product.

Reviewing the whole ‘sales priority’ problem with a professional adviser, working with B2B service companies, he suggested ”part of the explanation is that in many clients we find that fewer and fewer C-suite members actually understand how their sales operation functions.”

Catalyst heard of one company whose ‘sales’ taskforce had finally reported back after six months. Their verdict? “Our data needs work”.  Six months water under the bridge, only to commence an IT review.  Would you buy shares in that company?

The winning ingredients for a business development culture are: attitude, skills, motivation and process. An ‘attitude issue’ is at fault here. It may not affect your own company. But it certainly isn’t a myth. One contributory factor is UK culture, in contrast to our American cousins, to Dubai and other growing economies. Many of us clearly feel sales to be a bit vulgar and grubby.

Not sure? Just ask yourself, how many TV news items have you seen about export sales successes? When Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais wanted to make fun of business, who did they invent? Gareth Cheeseman and David Brent – salesmen!

Another unhelpful factor is the way many companies start up and grow. It often doesn’t initially involve sales professionals as such. Thus the pattern is set.

In a research project, eight years ago, I asked founders of 30 Midlands SMEs about their company history. Up to 55% of Midlands business turnover is in manufacturing, engineering and construction, and most were in those sectors.

Every single firm had been founded by engineers, designers, subject-matter experts who wanted independence and already knew they could get initial business. In most cases, there was no consequent strategic plan for growth, but hard work and luck meant each company still managed to grow.

Eventually, however, the board eagerly handed over sales responsibility to a more junior ‘rep’. At which point, the disconnection mentioned above probably took root.

Dan Barlow has seen the symptoms. “We took on one specialist manufacturer, who was struggling with profitability,” he recounts. “One reason we uncovered was how many different sales processes they had, selling different lines, sometimes even to the exact same companies. Chaos. Nobody senior had ever noticed the issue.

“Not unusual. Directors get disconnected – if they ever even worked in sales, they lose the ‘muscle memory’ they used to have when they were hands on.”

Perhaps the cure for this is to copy vintage ‘troubleshooting’ TV show, Back to the Floor, in which business leaders overcame issues by getting back into the machine shop or, indeed, out on the road. Get your whole board to engage with the sales effort at the sharp end for a month – see what they can learn and improve.

Overcoming the UK’s cultural distaste for sales feels like harder work but one way may be to physically remove the disconnect. “None of my head guys has an office to themselves”, Barlow reveals. “Everybody is out there where the work, and deals, are being done.”

Of course, if your company is naturally sales averse there’s always the option of changing their mindset with an intervention. Really, selling is best thought of as helping, something we ourselves teach to clients in our workshops.

And if by helping your prospective clients, your staff can help themselves in terms of their 2025 salaries, that might just work for everybody.

This is a personal blog post.  Any opinions, findings, and conclusion or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Centre for the New Midlands or any of our associated organisations/individuals.

ABOUT OUR AUTHOR:

Danny Herbert is an independent brand and marketing strategy expert, with a long CV full of key Midlands clients from JLR to Millennium Point.

As well as his own consultancy, Spring Thinking (Central), he is part of the Catalyst alliance, recently founded to focus on growth consultancy. www.catalystcom.co.uk