[hn_throwaway_99]

Yes, but I feel this is somewhat of a tautology: of course lots of revenue makes things easier.

But the important part is to diagnose why you have low or declining sales. Sometimes it's because you don't have good sales people. But other times it's because the product you have isn't a good market fit, or it's really buggy, or your salespeople oversold and now your customers are unhappy with the actual functionality of your product.

[tnolet]

This is encapsulated by that simple statement. Do whatever you need to get sales.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I disagree, and that's why I responded. I've seen too many "we'll do whatever we need to do to get sales" turn into salespeople making unrealistic promises on impossibly tight deadlines.

So then the sale is made, but in a way that ends up destroying the long (and even medium) term health of the business. Product/engineering goes on a death march to get things done, by the end of it many of those folks are burnt out, customers are unhappy, and sales folks see the writing on the wall and are happy to bail with their fat commission.

It's like saying "do whatever you need to raise your stock price." There are healthy and unhealthy ways to do that, and the advice is useless if you don't carefully distinguish between the two.

[lostcolony]

So I think both of you are 'right', but you're choosing to interpret, and argue, the statement from different perspectives.

Sales are important. However, as you note, sales now should not come at the expense of sales later (or lead to returns later, or etc). And debugging low sales is non-trivial.

[1penny42cents]

Nailed it.

Focusing on sales to solve internal problems is like focusing on work to solve internal problems.

It can work to an extent, but sometimes you need to solve the internal problem before you can get the results you need.

So it's a feedback loop that leads to circular thinking. The problem is when we try to blame the external side of the feedback loop, to avoid seeing that our internal side is the problem.