Senior Help On Big Deals: If you have to throw your VP Sales (or yourself) at every big deal, you don’t have a scalable sales process, and that one person will always be a bottleneck. In fact, any time a single person is a bottleneck to any process, your growth is capped. What conditions would have to exist for 80% of your current big deals to close without help from the VP Sales or CEO? Can you enhance your sales process or product to reduce the need for VP Sales involvement? To make deals easier to win without as much help? Which other senior executives can be placed “on call” to step into big deals? Could customers who love you contribute some of their time to helping you? (Yes, this can happen, especially if you have a special privileges program for them.) Sales Reporting And Analysis: What conditions would have to exist for the team and executives to get all the reports and analysis they need with the click of a button? By publishing the sales results in real-time, such as with an application like Salesforce.com, can you eliminate the need for someone to do reporting altogether? Be aware of data-addiction: Which reports are nice-to-have versus need-to- have? It is common for executives and board members who ask for reports to forget that many take considerable time and energy to produce, and that time isn’t free because it takes people away from the business. Rather than blindly producing reports, ask them their business goal for the report. Maybe they need something other than what they want. Help executives understand the cost of the reports they want, so they can prioritize their requests. How can you redesign your reports to be more useful? Reports are often created just because someone wants it without a clear idea of its purpose.