Functional Breakdown of Corporate India:
- Finance & Consulting (45%): 📊 The Strategists: Expertise in financial modelling, M&A, and theoretical frameworks, they prioritize ROI, cost-efficiency, and market analysis.
- Business & Customer Operations (20%): 🤝 The Rainmakers: Deep experience in customer understanding, their outputs are customer-centric and Cost saving focused.
- Engineering & Technology (20%): ⚙️ The Builders: Product-focused leaders who understand the technical aspects of the business, their building blocks are innovation and product-market fit.
- Marketing & Brand (10%): 📣 The Storytellers: Experts in brand positioning and communication, their narratives focus on market perception and lead generation.
- HR & Admin (5%): 📋 The Organizers: Focused on internal systems, talent, and process efficiency, their focus is on building a scalable and compliant organization.
As the data shows, less than one in four leaders in Corporate India today comes from a background where they’ve had to sell something to survive.
I remember my grandmother’s kitchen. It was the bustling, aromatic heart of our home. In that traditional world, there was an unspoken rule: the “earning son,” the one who went out into the world and brought back a livelihood, was always fed a little more. He’d get the extra dollop of ghee, the larger piece of fish. It wasn’t about inequality; it was a simple, pragmatic acknowledgment of who fuelled the family’s survival.
Today, I look at the modern corporate world, our new “family,” and I see a strange inversion. The function that is the direct life blood, the one that goes out and earns—Sales—is often treated with the least reverence in the hallowed halls of strategy.
We’ve become a family that’s obsessed with the virtual storyteller (Marketing) and the eloquent rule-makers (Support Functions), while the one who actually puts food on the table is often seen as a necessary but unglamorous workhorse.
This raises a critical question: who is the real backbone of business? Are we heading into spreadsheet strong virtual corporates or street-smart nimble businesses?
The Great Corporate Debate: Who Really Runs the Show?
In my two decades in the corporate world, I’ve seen this debate play out almost every day. Especially since I joined as a marketeer grew as a business developer but excelled as a award winning revenue generator, story creator to story seller, I championed my cause in #Selling #SOLUTIONSELLING #AIR2IDEAS. However in my journey of launching Brands and Business dealing with corporates across geographies I realized:
- #Marketing is the charismatic sibling. They craft the beautiful narrative, build the brand’s mystique, products that become kings and create the buzz that makes the phone ring. Their work is visible, celebrated, and showcased in glossy presentations. They build the stage.
- Support Functions (Finance, HR, Operations) are the skeleton. They provide the essential structure, the rules, and the processes that keep the body from collapsing. Without them, there is chaos. They build the house.
- And then there is #Sales. Sales is the “earning son.” They are the ones at the coalface, taking the beautiful story and the solid structure out into the unforgiving real world. They are the ones who hear “no” a hundred times a day. They are the ones who truly understand a customer’s hesitation, the nuance of a negotiation, the budget constraints that never appear in a marketing persona chart. They don’t just build the stage or the house; they bring home the moolah that pays the bill and food that fills.
While Marketing campaigns win awards and new operational software gets celebrated. The salesperson quietly chases a target, closes a deal perseveres #MondayMorning #TargetVsAchievement Blues, come hail, storm, flood, famine or drought, the business must be logged the sales has to be closed. Yet they ensure the lights stay on for everyone else.
The Disconnect: Has the modern CXO experienced STREET to SPREADSHEET journey?
This brings me to the boardroom. I look at the leadership in many of today’s companies and I have to ask: How many of our CXOs have ever worked at the grassroots level? How many have faced a customer in real-time, felt the sting of a lost deal, or experienced the thrill of a hard-won contract?
We are in an era of jargon-fed CXOs, brilliant minds shaped in the sterile environments of consulting /ad firms and business schools. Their strategies are often masterpieces of theoretical elegance, filled with frameworks and acronyms. Yet, too often, these strategies shatter the moment they make contact with the real market, because they lack the one ingredient that can only be earned through experience: the salesperson’s nuanced understanding of the customer, how to win him over how to ensure service to earn more of him. A strategy without sales DNA is just a hypothesis.
The Ground-Up Visionary: A Lesson from a Tea Seller
When we look for a model of leadership that embodies this ground-up ethos, we don’t need to look far. India’s growth has been tee’d off by a Prime Minister who began his journey as a tea seller. Think about that. A chaiwala has to be a master salesperson every single day. He has to understand and position USP of his product, engage with his customer, craft competitive pricing, understand his competition at the most granular level. There is no room for jargon when you are trying to sell a five-rupee cup of tea. There is only value, connection and the art of selling his perishable product daily.
This journey, from a seller to a vision executioner, is the most powerful lesson in business. The daily grind of selling instils a pragmatism, an empathy, and a deep understanding of human motivation that no MBA program can replicate. #NAMO
Don’t we need more Ground-up #NAMOs in our corporate world? Leaders who have the courage to create a vision, passion to learn with an unformidable on-ground experience on how to earn. We need fewer leaders who hide behind spreadsheets and more who have the gumption to sell, feel the pulse of the buyer, the market place to understand how to bridge the gap of knowing your customer to acquiring your customer to retaining and growing that customer.
THE REALITY GAP remains: Less than 1 in 4 leaders in Corporate India today come from non-front domain. Are Indian companies managing decline instead of investing in growth? Prioritizing cost-cutting over market-creation? It’s time we, as a corporate family, remember who are the “earning sons”.
The future belongs to companies led by those who can efficiently manage both: The real street & The actual spreadsheet.
Most importantly: The future generation CXOs who would have lived and thrived only in virtual world, how are we going to bridge the gap of Lead generation vs sale closure? Virtual to reality? AI to Actuality?
Lets debate this further..
#SalesLeadership #GroundUpLeadership #RevenueGrowth #FutureOfLeadership #BusinessStrategy #CorporateIndia #CXO #Sales #Marketing #BoardroomVsFrontline #SalesVsMarketing #LeadershipGap #WalkTheTalk #IndianBusiness #VR #AI #NAMO