Companies fear looking at changes or improvements to their sales forces for good reason: sales are the engine that drives revenue. No matter how patched up or sputtering that engine may be, the mere thought of overhauling it fills CEOs and senior executives alike with dread. Companies will make ongoing, piecemeal repairs as long as they can in a vain attempt to keep revenue flowing. They will tolerate behavior and performance from sales and marketing that would not be tolerated in any other areas of the business. For CEOs, there comes a point where changes or improvements must be made to these two areas of a business if growth is to continue. The world is not static, and sales and marketing organizations cannot be allowed to stagnate and to operate using now-primitive thinking. These business units are the last frontier for CEOs to address in business improvement. Fear of the unknown, and the use of the wrong lens for viewing the business, are the greatest barriers to overcome. The first step for any CEO is to become empowered with the knowledge of how the sales and marketing business should function; only then can he or she hope to become competitive and deliver profitable growth in today's ultracompetitive market. Most of the information that people are exposed to has been written by former middle managers of sales and marketing units. Such information is narrow in content and is focused on compensation plans, training, and ingenuous reporting. This book is written by a CEO, for CEOs like you, and is based on more than twenty-five years of consulting with CEOs in business turnarounds and profit improvement. This work views the broader demands of business that you, as a sales focused CEO, must deal with; it establishes the thinking that you will require for reassessing your marketing and sales forces. This book gives you a new lens for viewing your business and teaches you how to become a sales focused CEO. It will assist CEOs like you in joining the minority of leaders who are capable of achieving strategy execution; such leaders can achieve growth of 25 to 40 percent through the change process in shorter time frames. If you want to change your company's results, then The Sales Focused CEO is a must-read!
About the Author: Adele Crane is a leading and highly respected international business consultant with over 25 years' experience working in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, North America, the United Kingdom and South Africa. Her expertise in leading change and growth is widely relied upon and she is considered a thought leader. Adele's consultancy work, through cultural change, sales transformations and development of high-performance teams, has produced results for hundreds of organisations in many different industries. She is arguably one of the most experienced experts in this field in the world today. Adele's success has received recognition in major media forums across the world, and in her keynote speaking she has shared the stage with some of the most recognised and successful CEOs and business thought leaders. She has conducted more than two hundred in-depth business reviews and developed plans that have assisted companies to achieve tens of millions of dollars of top-line revenue and above- industry-standard profits. Her sales leadership capability has been demonstrated many times over. She has personally delivered profitable revenue improvement across many industries in 90 to 120 days, with sustainable growth achievements in excess of 40 percent in each company serviced, and has delivered more successful turnarounds in the past decade than any other known consultant. Adele is renowned for her extraordinary diagnostics of businesses and her ability to provide candid and in-depth knowledge that assists companies in realising their revenue improvement. Senior executives seek Adele's analytical capabilities when they are looking to transform their sales organisations by establishing the right priorities for their projects with her keen eye on both top-line and bottom-line profitability. Adele's depth of knowledge and expertise in sales and marketing organisations make her one of the foremost authorities in this field.