A few years ago I took over responsibility for a market, a wholly owned sales organisation belonging to a major office furniture manufacturer. Very quickly it was obvious the team was not pulling in the same direction.
I spent my first weeks meeting with our key customers and apologising for promises we had failed to keep. I listened to their frustrations. Then I sat down with our own people and listened to theirs. These were all good and capable people, everyone worked hard and nobody lacked ability. They just weren’t aligned, and the gaps between functions were where all the damage was happening.
The different functions were doing their own thing, processes were lacking, and the cracks were showing up where it mattered most, in front of customers.
The first action I took was to appoint a strong operations lead, and together we mapped out exactly where those gaps were and wrote processes (SOPs) to close them. Next we restructured the team responsibilities to match the new systems. That was really the whole intervention. We didn’t run a sales training programme and we didn’t bring in new selling techniques. What we needed wasn’t a team that could sell better but to become a partner our customers could trust to simply deliver what we said we would.
Within a few months the mood had changed, on both sides. Our team had was more upbeat, and had more confidence because they were no longer firefighting the same issues over and over again, and customers noticed the difference in how reliably we showed up for them. Sales climbed, and we ended up with a record year. I’m sure some of that was favourable market conditions, and I wouldn’t claim otherwise. But the bulk of it came down to something much less glamorous than a clever go-to-market move: we stopped messing up, consistently, and that alone changed how customers saw us.
Coming from an operations/PM background rather than a sales one probably helped me see this clearly. I already believed that structure and process are what sales performance actually rests on, and I had a reasonable sense of where those weaknesses tend to hide in an organisation like ours. What I didn’t expect was how much of the job would be listening to old frustrations that had built up long before I arrived, and how much of a privilege it actually was to finally be in a position to fix them.
Looking back, the pattern feels almost too simple to be worth writing down, but I think that’s exactly why it gets missed. When an organisation underperforms, the instinct is usually to look at the sales team. Better targets, better incentives, better training, a new sales manager with a stronger track record. Sometimes that is genuinely the answer. But often the sales team is a symptom, not the cause, and what’s often broken sits upstream in fulfilment, in handoffs between functions, in commitments made without the operational backing to keep them.
So I guess I’m trying to say, customer experience is never just a sales function, because a customer doesn’t experience your departments separately. They experience the whole thing at once, as one relationship, and every broken handoff between sales and operations and delivery shows up to them as a single impression of whether you can be trusted. So when the numbers are down, it’s worth resisting the urge to look only at the sales team, and asking instead whether your organisation as a whole is truly set up to keep the promises it’s making.
