The Painful Planning Mistake Boards & Sales VPs Make Every Year Reminder: if you are brand new to selling, I'd recommend starting by reading Chapters 6 and 7. I'm going to start by addressing head-on one of the biggest misconceptions in modern, effective sales: that adding salespeople and working them harder is what grows revenue. For companies selling products worth less than $100,000-$250,000, the old school strategy of hiring more “feet on the street” to drive revenue growth is failing more often than not. Let's take companies who want to grow fast, mostly through adding new customers (rather than more mature companies who drive much of their growth through their customer base). The problem they face is that the old bedrock sales principles that worked before the Internet do not work anymore. "I need to double revenue growth, and I need to double my sales force to drive it, or make my current team work twice as hard." Wrong. In high-productivity sales organizations, salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth, they fulfill it. This is a huge shift in traditional sales thinking. I'm talking about root cause drivers, not correlations. Of course you need more salespeople if you're getting bigger, but they aren't what is causing the bulk of new customer growth. Also, while they are quite popular and simple sales strategies of CEOs, sales executives and salespeople, "work harder" and "make more calls" don't scale. Most salespeople already work enough hours, and trying to get them to work harder is like trying to solve a problem by going faster in the wrong direction. It's bailing water out of the boat faster rather than fixing the leak.