CEO and Sales are two highly exciting terms which tend to lure many because of its fabulous prospects. A CEO is the most senior corporate officer, leader or administrator who manages an organization and has the role of maximizing the value of the entity. This includes increasing the share price, market share, revenues and other areas and report the proceedings to the board of directors. On the other hand, salespersons are those who are charged with the responsibility of selling the products and services that a company produces to other businesses or other consumers. For this, they need to be extremely active, full of interest and must possess advanced verbal skills to attract the interest of more and more customers and lure them to buy the products. The more they sell the greater the profit for a company.

Now, many a time a CEO is also considered to be the biggest salesperson of a company and thereby are expected to take over the position of leading the sales team. But is this really correct? Should a CEO lead a sales team considering the workload that he already has to himself?

In this article, we shall find the answers to these questions as we will talk about the good and the bad aspects of this.

Advantages:

1. A CEO helps improve Sales Conversations:

The foremost need of making an exceptional salesperson is to have awesome communication skills and the ability to engage in great conversations. A CEO can help his sales team with this and help make their verbal skills evolve. They can train their reps by attending many sales calls and interactions with clients to help their team understand and learn from it. Being a leader, a CEO needs to believe in the sales team, solve their doubts and should be open to interactions with his teammates. It is important for the leaders to teach the team that selling their products is an effect of great conversation also with appropriate value exchange.

Suppose you are the CEO and sales lead of a lead generation software firm AeroLeads. You must tell your teammates about the in-depth advantages of using the software and how they can talk their prospects into using the AeroLeads services to generate more leads for their site in no time.

2. The confidence of every member boosts around CEO:

Having confidence in yourself and in the product you sell, is the major mantra for getting success in sales. One needs to understand that it is good and bad in everything and what a salesperson must do is to focus on the good of the product he is selling.

The role of a sales team leader is to inject confidence in his mates regarding the product and services and making them rid of the disadvantages. A CEO can help his team with this in the most efficient way. CEO must first prepare a presentation outlining the why and how of the product line. Next, he should mentor his team to focus on the best products of your product. Doing this decreases the probability of failure. After this, the CEO must be confident in expressing his opinions and educating others and back up his teaching with some of the other data.

Now that you eliminate the disadvantages everyone is then proud to sell the product and thus will help improve the confidence exponentially.

3. Provides one visibility into the business:

As a CEO it is relatively easy to lose track of the simple and inner working of a business. But as one becomes a sales lead, they need to learn about the use of CRM and also how contracts worked at billing level.

Having even the basic level of clarity, a CEO now becomes all-knowing and he successfully unearths the inefficiencies in the sales process that needed to be addressed. Now the CEO also has knowledge of how to present their company before potential leads and investors. Also, leading the sales call will give a CEO insight of what’s happening and get a feedback from their prospects.

4. CEO helps save money by making efficient plans:

The best catch in making a CEO the leader of a sales team is that the CEO always looks for the benefit of the organization and will go to any extent to make the deal a success. Making a CEO the leader of the sales team saves a firm from employing a new head which in turn helps save money as the CEO would accept the role without needing any pay raise and also won’t take any commission on the deals he or she cracks. This, in turn, makes the board member and the investors happy and grow their belief in you as they now know that you are willing to do anything for the success of the firm.

Disadvantages:

1. Shows Lack of Trust:

For anyone to work to his full potential it’s very necessary for the leader to show trust in him. In contrast, when the CEO joins the sales team as a leader and would get involved in every sales aspect, it shows signs of lack of trust in the entire sales and marketing team. Also, the CEO being the head would like to impose his tricks and ideas on the entire team which is just not good enough. To succeed in sales, it is important that the CEO must leave it every individual to work freely and interact with every individual in a way he believes he can do the best. This is only possible if the company shows trust and support in their salesperson and the CEO must only motivate the sales team once in a while to show this get the best out of the sales.

2. Tough to adapt to change:

For any person to adapt to a change is really tough and it won’t happen in a single day. For some it much longer as we as humans tend to resist changes. When a CEO becomes a sales lead, he needs to be adaptable and it becomes tough for him to shake everyone up and double down on things that were already working.

It may happen the sales team already have strong processes working in their benefit for which the CEO must be ready to adapt to and not change them according to themselves.

3. Proper management of time:

The CEO is no small person and is charged with lots and lots of responsibilities. Adding to his already filled chest of responsibility by making him the sales lead make it extremely tough for him to maintain and balance all of it at the same time. The CEO needs to focus for the benefit of the firm by attending to meetings with the high investors and also must drive positive energy to the employees of his company and is in charge of leadership and innovation of a company. So, it becomes hard for him to divide and denote proper time into the assessment of every department of the company.

4. Makes your company look smaller:

It doesn’t happen every day that the CEO is leading the sales calls with prospects and is indulging in every aspect of sales. It is beneficial if the CEO comes in at the end of the process to impress the prospect into investing but is he leads it then injects negative impact upon the prospects who then think of the firm to be a small one.

Final Say:

There are varying opinions on whether to make the CEO a sales lead or not. Also, as shown in the article there are both advantages and disadvantages of this but that is exactly the case in everything one does. In some areas, there can be no other leader greater than the CEO of a sales team but in some areas, the CEO as a sales leader can be ineffective or even problematic.