The sales force of an organization is not a team consisting of the best finishers/closers and relationship management champions.It is designated to contain a potent team of brand custodians.

A brand custodian is someone who cares less about his yearly targets than he cares about the nature of assignments his organization picks up. Seth godin has been writing in his recent articles on how important it is to pick up the right jobs/work packages. A very pertinent simile on how bending a sapling completely hinders the growth was mentioned by Godin very recently.

A person/team who/which qualifies an opportunity or accepts a work package from a client needs to envision if it would fall in line with the future growth path of the firm.

And thats not all. Brand custodians can never be just outward bound. They need to have a strong connection with their internal teams. Every single rung of the internal teams needs to know atleast superficially why the firm does not take up a select category of opportunities. If you ask me, every employee of a firm, in his/her own little way is a brand custodian. All the brand custodians of a firm need to be on the same page else the brand is bound to suffer.

At such a juncture, frontline sales teams, strategizers are reduced to an external life support system. Till the guys who are doing good work persist, the company subsists- beyond that, the firm starts dying.