I was once in a meeting where the engineering department was screaming that the sales team sucked. (Not a fun meeting.) But it does bring to light the question, Who is Responsible for Sales?

Everyone is responsible for sales. Every single person in your company.

Marketing is every touch of the customer, prospect or marketplace. That means billing, trade booth, advertising, social media, the color of the paper, the way the phone is answered, attitude - literally everything.

In Engineering, you folks have a smartphone right? Your customers want something that easy to use, that cool, that functional. If you can't deliver that, well, sales will stall, because likely someone else has something better - all they have to do is Google to find it.

In billing, is the bill correct? Is it easy to read? Are the taxes correct? When they call in, do you resolve the issue in a pleasant tone?

Tech support, customer support, etc. get the brunt of the customer frustration, but you are also the face of the company at that point. The customer can be won or lost during each call. It isn't fun to deal with anger and frustration while also being clocked and measured, because support is looked at as an expense, overhead. In fact, support is your customer retention department. You know that metric called churn that The Street scrutinizes? It is handled here.

Provisioning and Ordering have to be smooth and detailed and clearly communicating with all departments. These are the gears of the machine.

The C-Suit - CEO, CMO, CTO, CIO, CFO, CSO, blah blah - vision, culture, brand are not just words on a slide deck that you dust off once or twice a year. You have to live it! Leadership is by example. Words are great, but actions speak louder than words.

In most companies, departments are silos. One department head cannot correct or make a change in another department. The C-Suite has to make certain that the changes are happening across the board.

So, yeah, salespeople and channel managers are the grunts on the street trying to close deals and increase revenue, but the sales department is just one cog in the wheel. Any cog can clog up the machine - but sales will be the one that gets fired.