Listen instead on your Monday Morning Drive:

If I asked you to tell me about your sales team, what would you say?

More than half of you would tell me you have no one in sales, because most of us don’t like that word. No one considers themselves a salesperson.

But you didn’t understand the question. I didn’t ask if you have people with business cards that say “Salesperson” on them. I asked who gets sales done.

You might respond, “We have production managers, project managers, technical directors, designers, and department heads who help meet customer needs.”

Great. Who’s the salesperson?

“There isn’t one.”

Yes, there is.

The Hidden Sales Function

I’ve seen 50+-year-old companies with dozens of employees without a single person in any kind of sales role or sales department. The entire company consists of order takers — which, by the way, is a form of sales.

Sales is a process, not a title — just like project management is a process, not a title. Somebody tells the customer how much things cost. I don’t care what you call them. They’re doing sales right now.

I know all the reasons you don’t want the sales title:

• “Sales means I have to find new business!”
• “Sales means I have to be smartly dressed!”
• “Sales means I have to wear a bad sport jacket and have lunch with people!”

I don’t care what you think sales is or what movie gave you that impression. People who create revenue for your company and interface with clients come in all shapes, sizes, and roles. But selling is involved.

Three Dysfunctional Models

Over the decades, the event production business has developed three variations of the sales/project management model, and none solve the problems they’re trying to address:

1. The Handoff Model

An account executive talks to the client, then assigns the opportunity to a project manager who handles the site survey and technical drawings, builds the estimate, and figures out how many widgets you’ll need.

The account executive (or, more often, the project manager) then tells the client what the project will cost.

What did we need the account executive for?

2. The Account Executive as Production Manager

This person surveys the site, technically specs the show, oversees prep, hires people, orders trucks, arranges travel, goes to the job site, and sometimes even puts on a headset to call the show.

They present themselves as the all-in-one solution, but in reality they are a huge process bottleneck with very limited revenue capacity.

3. The Production Manager as Account Executive

A key client loves working with a particular on-site production manager and always starts with that person. There’s no account executive, so the production manager fills that role. This creates a single point of failure in the client relationship, and we can’t get that production manager out of the role without risking that client’s business.

Who wins? The customer gets everything they want and more at the lowest possible margin to you. Production Managers won’t compromise on sending the right people and equipment, but they aren’t really concerned with business of negotiation.

Account management and production management are two different jobs that rarely need to be done by the same person. The Venn diagram of skills shows little overlap.

The Owner Problem

Often, the owner is the salesperson but doesn’t realize it.

They don’t think they’re in sales because what they’re doing feels instinctive. Everyone has built mechanisms around them — production managers, project managers, lead techs, technical directors, designers, and draftsmen — to support the one salesperson (the owner) who doesn’t do much more than throw out a number and hope everyone can make it work.

For a small company, having the owner as the salesperson with a support team is about as scalable as you can get — except everyone ends up going out on the job, leaving nobody to work on the next job. It’s a recipe for burnout.

From Three-Legged Stool to Venn Diagram

Previously, I taught you that your business is a three-legged stool: sales, operations, and finance. If one leg buckles, the stool collapses.

That’s not what I teach anymore. Why? It’s a gap model.

Project managers were created to fill the enormous gaps between sales, ops, and finance. Operations wants a completely planned job from sales, while sales wants to hand a half-formed idea to ops. We created project managers to fill in the blanks. Then, we used admin to get the information required to bill the job — another gap.

My evolved business model focuses on selling, planning, and administration as a Venn diagram. These overlapping processes are outcome-driven:

• Selling: Delivers a clear scope of work for an ideal customer at a reasonable margin
• Planning: Combines information and resources into a show book that the crew can execute
• Administration: Handles money, office, personnel, HR, infrastructure, and reporting so everyone else can focus on their jobs

There are no gaps — just processes that connect and serve one another.

You Don’t Need the “Sales” Title

You don’t have to call anybody a salesperson as long as the selling process produces clear scopes of work for ideal customers at reasonable margins. I don’t care how you get there or what titles you use.

You can use marketing and business development to fill the top of the funnel. You can have project consultants guide potential buyers to the right solutions. You can have project estimators price jobs. No one has to wear the dreaded salesperson hat as long as you close deals.

That said, not calling people “sales” just circumvents the boulder in the middle of the road. It’s not the goal — it’s the excuse many owners use for their dysfunctional business model.

The Planning Solution

The solution to eliminating project managers is building a planning team that handles 90% of what project management tasks normally involve before the show. Planning bridges the gap between what the customer thinks they want and what you’ll actually do for them.

This includes technical design, specifications, equipment allocation, truck scheduling, hiring technicians, booking travel, and generating drawings. All these elements come together in the planning department, where your most intelligent people should be — not out on show sites doing one show at a time.

Your field production manager is really your resident fixer. The best production managers try their damndest to use the plan they’ve been given, but they know they’ll have to throw it out as soon as the truck hits the dock.

The Bottom Line

Stop running from your role in selling. Whether you admit it or not, you’re part of the revenue process.

That show that went off without a hitch last month? It started with someone selling something to someone else. That client who keeps coming back? They’re buying something from you because someone in your company sold them on your value.

Think about what’s at stake. Your reputation, your expertise, and your talented team mean nothing without profitable revenue. Without embracing the selling function, you’ll run out of money and exit the game entirely.

So, call yourself whatever makes you comfortable — consultant, solutions architect, client liaison, etc. — but recognize that when you help turn ideas into revenue, you’re selling. The magic happens when you stop fighting this reality and start using it to your advantage.