05/06/2025

Winning the Right Customers isn’t Just a Sales Issue

It is also a strategy issue

Does your organization sell what you want, to whom you want, the way you want? Or do you have too many instances of selling whatever you can, to whomever you can, however you can? If your strategy is built on winning in specific target markets with solutions in which you've invested to drive high-margin growth, the latter approach undermines that focus.

It's easy to point to the skills (or lack thereof) of your sales team as the cause of the problem. There are always opportunities for sellers to improve the way they interact with customers and prospects. But not winning enough of the right customers, selling what you've prioritized and in which you've most invested, at the prices you need, is a leadership and strategy issue. Not only a sales issue.

When I ask executives how well their sales teams understand their go-to-market strategy on a scale of 1–10, the average is 6.4. Not terrible, but certainly not great. But when I ask sales teams how well they understand the company go-to-market strategy, their answers are an average of 3.7. That is a dangerously low number when you consider that every sales call represents the success or failure of your strategy in the market.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.