We’ve had a lot of clients express the desire for a short-term sales boost, and our canned response is that there are few levers you can pull besides price to increase sales in the next 30-90 days.

You can read more about that here and here.

Oddly enough, we’ve also heard of companies with the exact opposite problem – the sales department is crushing it so hard that production and engineering can’t keep up. Sales is often pressured to “slow down” by operations and business leadership so they can catch up.

We have a canned response for this as well: DON’T SLOW DOWN SALES! THAT’S ####ING CRAZY!

Think about sales like a jet engine. It takes a little time to warm up the engines and take off, but once you’re flying at maximum altitude it’s an incredibly bad idea to stop feeding gas to the engines. The result is a death spiral followed by a flaming crash.

Sales are the same way. Your sales staff is succeeding at what it was designed to do: sell. It’s working, working well. Production and engineering can’t keep up? Fix that problem.

It’s a much better idea to use these increased sales as an opportunity to increase your presence and your capabilities by investing in the company.

This will lead to more opportunities, more plant capabilities, more to sell! Now is no time to pump the brakes, it’s time to sell, sell, SELL!