Revenue or Margin? What's your game?

Is Revenue the only figure a sales person should be paying attention to?

In my past experience I have been working with public companies where Revenue seemed to be the only goal.

"Production will have to take care of the margin" is not an unfamiliar sentence. It is kind of true that as long as you do not completely run out of cash, the more revenue you get for your company, the better. However you can get yourself in a very tricky situation if Revenue is the sole driver and the sole objective.

The company strategy can also influence this: If your sales people are completely disconnected from production, receive bonus solely on revenue increase, it is very likely that the importance of other factors will be minor.

In SMEs however, the growth and stability of the companies is much more related to the margins that a specific project or program allows.

More than ever, companies should do all they can to analyse their client base and extract the right conclusions.

Sales, Marketing and Production efforts should go to those clients that are strategically more important for the company. It could very well be that clients bringing loads of revenue are not bringing any margin and therefore taking resources from serving those clients that would really bring benefits and allow the company to grow.

Actually I don't really believe that there is a difference on this point between big and smaller companies. The only difference is that the problems could be easier to hide if you are big enough.