It's more important than ever. You practically have to be a super-hero to pull it off. As never before, a company's fortunes depend on the performance of its sales team. Wriggles out of any dilemma and strrrrrretches to an organization's highest levels. The days of pitching to the head of purchasing have gone the way of polyester neckties.
Smart salespeople sell as high on the corporate food chain as they can go.
Use your CEO to break down the door. If Bill Gates promised that Microsoft would service a product around the clock, people believed him, because Bill was in a position to make that happen. By taking Gates along on critical sales calls, Dayton quickly discovered that a CEO could talk to another CEO in a way that no one on the sales team would dare duplicate. We were in Silicon Valley to meet with a hardware manufacturer, one of the big 20. The other CEO wasn't focusing on the meeting.