ManageSmarter Rewind: When the Going Gets Too Good July 30, 2007 Originally published in Sales & Marketing Management, June 1997
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When the Going Gets Too Good (Sales & Marketing Management, June 2006)
It's a problem every company should have: Sales grow too quickly. The bottom line looks tremendous. Top executives and shareholders are ecstatic. But unexpected growth can cause growing pains (such as staffing problems, customer service quandaries, and late deliveries) for any company, and the inevitable loser in all of this is the customer.
"When growth happens too quickly, the first group of people to suffer are customers," says Craig Ulrich, principal with Mercer Management Consulting in New York. "When there are more orders to fulfill than people who can handle them, it ultimately will be customers who lose out because they won't get products on time or won't get the service they expected when they signed."
It's something Kirk Givins knows a lot about. His company, Johnson Manufacturing Company in Yakima, Washington, acquired an industry ally late last year. As a regional sales vice president, Givins had the unenviable task of guiding his sales force through the acquisition of many new customers. "With the additional company came the responsibility of more than 100 extra customers for my division," Givins says. "It was nice to have the extra revenue, but keeping up with it was difficult."
But Givins's group, composed of 40 salespeople before the acquisition and 60 reps after, was prepared to handle the influx. With many new customers, the key for the company was to have good communication between the salespeople and customer service reps. And the system was already in place before the new company was bought. "We had monthly meetings with the service department and had an intranet where information on all customers was shared," Givins says. "These things made it easier for us to deal when we were hit with a bunch of new customers to service."
Ulrich says the only companies that get blindsided—and negatively affected—by growth are the ones that don't already have the infrastructure in place to deal with it. "Growth should never swamp an organization," he says. "A company that completely understands how its communication processes work should be able to map out what it will take to handle the new sales and then do it. A company's worst internal flaws get exposed when quick growth happens."
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