By Tim Mead
Managing Director - Gustin Partners

“You need to find us a new sales leader.”

If Gustin Partners responded in the affirmative every time one of us heard this imperative through the years, the firm would have recruited a significantly greater number of revenue-generators.

However, in the process, the firm would have done a great disservice to many of its clients.

Why?

Because faltering sales often are symptomatic of a larger ill—one not cured with a new figurehead. R&D may not be producing valuable products and services. Marketing may not be shaping a differentiated value proposition. Distribution may be inefficient. After-sales support and service may be weak. Complacency may pervade the corporate culture. Execs may be out of sync—finger pointing and back stabbing. Any single factor, let alone a combination of them, can stifle growth.

Soaring sales, conversely, usually speak to the health of an entire organization—not necessarily a brilliant salesman or saleswoman leading the charge.

Achieving and maintaining such a level of fitness is a herculean feat for a company—so recognized by the lofty valuation placed on such a performer by analysts from Wall Street, The City, Beijing Financial Street or any other global financial center.
Growth is its own lingua franca.

It is stunning, nevertheless, to see how many Global 2000 (Forbes) companies struggle with the challenge of top line growth—despite, presumably, having access to the best minds (Tier 1 management consultants, bulge-bracket and boutique investment bankers, organization development gurus, ad agencies, seasoned managers, top MBA school recruits, PhDs on staff etc.) to proffer and to execute on novel growth plans. Many resort to placating shareholders—though not necessarily stakeholders (employees, suppliers, channels, communities)—through stock buybacks, dividend creation and increases, and other feats of financial engineering rather than face the truth — “We’ve forgotten how to grow!” — and deal with it.

The path to restored growth is hardly an easy one—i.e., you can’t just dial it up with a call to us.  A CEO and his or her team must press on to do so—often at an atomic level (front lines, small business units, etc.). Witness:

• HP CEO Meg Whitman’s recent acknowledgement, “We need to do a better job growing the top line.” Her response in part has been to reignite channel partner programs through better joint business development programs, improved pricing processes and the like. “For me,” Whitman told investors on a recent quarterly earnings call, “it all comes down to our will to win. And we are committed to win.”
• Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan’s initiative—against all historic odds in the financial services industry—to increase cross-selling across his retail bank and private wealth management service lines. He’s gone so far as to tie the annual grades (aka, performance reviews) of his regional presidents to meeting referral quotas.
• Daily Mail & General Trust CEO Martin Morgan is reaping the rewards for having the courage to redefine DMGT’s business model—discarding old line businesses (newspapers) that defined the company for eons, investing in geographic markets outside of its UK base and giving his managers a high degree of autonomy.
• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison adding five hundred sales contributors—many just off college campuses—to push the company’s cloud offerings, seemingly ignoring  the advice of an Financial Times columnist to enjoy old age (as a company).

If you work for a global giant and do not see the company’s leader exerting consistent pressure to grow the top line, ask yourself whether you want to be part of an organization that lacks the will and means to achieve this kind of success.

For mid-cap ($2 billion to $10 billion in value) companies and smaller ones, the challenge to expand sales is somewhat less daunting because the organizations aren’t as complex or as big to manage.

Breaking into a new category of product, service or geography can produce dramatic results.

Just look at Boston Beer Company, whose Samuel Adams brand hadn’t been growing as fast as the beer market—leading stock analysts to fall out of favor with the company. Not for long, however, thanks to the surge in popularity for the company’s Angry Orchard cider beer, which it rolled out nationally a year ago. The product now generates 20% of the company’s $650 + million in sales. An interesting element to the Angry Orchard story is that its potential success had been brewing for over a decade. “It started out as more of a side project, and we'd experiment with fermentation and apples, “senior brewing manager David Sipes told The Street earlier this year.”We've experimented with too many recipes to count, but that process helped us learn what apples, yeast and aging techniques made the best cider.”

Mobiquity is another case in point. The VC-backed consultant started as an idea in the head of a former colleague (from my days at Cambridge Technology Partners) and another individual in early 2011. “I think we’re looking at another S-curve, much like the one we saw in client-server computing in the early 1990s,” cofounder Bill Seibel (CEO) conjectured over breakfast two years ago, springing for an omelet and cup of coffee to pick Gustin Partners’ brains about work the firm did in enterprise mobility services for a major wireless carrier. Where the carrier failed (too early to market), Bill & company succeeded—with headcount at Mobiquity today well over a hundred.

Itron adds further proof. The $2 billion (revenues) smart-grid supplier, best known for its increasingly intelligent electric and gas meters, hit a wall in demand for its energy products in the first quarter of 2013 as several major projects wound down in North America. However, internationally its water meters are flowing into India, with two recent orders—one for 120,000 units, another for 90,000 meters—and into Western Europe (where it captured a 100,000-unit order in Spain). While new geographic expansion may not be able to offset short-term declines in its established market, Itron’s vitality appears to satisfy investors.

Revenue growers also tend to be managed by aligned teams, ones populated by individuals who put office politics and fiefdom building aside for a greater reward—often defined as venally as commercial success.

Achieving alignment often takes on a personal dimension—one in which my colleague Charlie Gustin regularly works as he guides CEOs and their managers (at small companies) and functional/geographic leaders and their staffs (at big ones) through workshop exercises aimed at getting to the cruxes of their collective endeavors.  Most know what they want to be.  Most know how to get there. What they lack often is self-knowledge on an individual and team basis about whether they can achieve their goals.

Confidence, built on knowledge and its ally trust, is the essential ingredient in building top-line growth.

As one of my old bosses, Chris Greendale, used to say to newbies in monthly orientation classes at Cambridge (numbering 100 to 200 type “A” personalities a month) when he ran sales and marketing for the systems integrator: “Stand up. Raise your hands. And repeat after me: ‘Everybody is in sales.’”

Truer words have rarely been spoken--at least for growth-committed enterprises.