The Sales Learning Curve

I have seen many, many business plans that have made this same logical conclusion: more salesforce means faster sales, leading to faster profitability. Mark makes a really good observation:

When we apply the MLC to sales, we come to the following conclusion: The time it takes to achieve cash flow breakeven is reasonably independent of sales force staffing. It is, instead, entirely dependent on how well and how quickly the entire organization learns what it takes to sell the product or service while incorporating customer feedback into the product itself. Because the entire organization has to come up to speed, hiring a large initial sales staff does not speed up the time to breakeven, it simply consumes cash more quickly.

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Comments

[Dave Chase]

My firm, Altus Alliance, hosted an event that Mark Leslie spoke at focused on the Sales Learning Curve. We posted his presentation and whitepaper for those interested. Typical of the feedback we received on Mark's presentation was from a serial entrepreneur who's the CEO of a very successful anti-spam firm -- "I thought that the talk was nothing short of excellent. Often those things are lame-o and I will tell you that this was top 1%. Thanks again for including us. Do you have the deck? We would love to see it." Here it is -- http://altusalliance.com/ceoInfo.html