Hello and welcome to Business 300.

My name is Philip Kulenshov and this is 300 Seconds about business.

We're all a busy people, so I have five minutes or less to get my point across.

Here we are again. Another five. The five functions of a business must all revolve around delivering value to the customer if the business is to be successful in its aim. It's possible to have a business without that focus, but not for long. If customers get sidelined, sooner or later they'll feel that and stop being your customers.

A devoted focus on serving customers well attracts customers and enables your business to be successful.

But a misaligned self-focus, when the business or a department in the business focuses on serving itself, does the opposite.

It pushes customers away. So what does it look like when business departments lose that outward focus and instead start trying to serve themselves?

What does it look like for a business to exist for its own sake? In episode 161, I talked about

what a self-serving strategy looks like. This time we're going to talk about sales. What does self-serving

sales look like? In a properly ordered business, the sales function serves the purpose of promoting

the value the business has to offer for the customer. The business exists to give value to a customer,

sales exists to make sure the customer knows about that value. As a business gets more complex,

there are different levels to value promotion. There As a business gets more complex, there are different

levels to value promotion. There's sales and there's marketing. There's inside sales and outside

sales. There's upstream marketing and downstream marketing. I get that tagging value promotion

with one word is simplistic. And that's okay. I only have five minutes here. Call the function

what you may. The point is that value needs to be promoted. We need to

get the customer's attention, foster interest, solve problems, and bring the customer to see the

value being offered to the point of committing their money. At the fundamental level, value promotion

is sales. But the sales function misses all of that when it approaches its work from a self-serving

starting point. The starting point is revenue growth.

Where strategy considers the bottom line, sales is responsible for the top line.

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