Chief Sales Officers are the prime owners of securing healthy sales levels for their company. How can this be done when customers cut and cut and cut cost ... and the banks are less and less willing to give credit to businesses?

The "classical" response is "we must save ourselves out of the crisis". More pressure on sales people, cut cost (even more?), reducing work time, lay off people. Will these decisions be the carriers of success to protect the company's sales?

AN INNOVATIVE ANSWER OFFERS A WAY OUT OF THE CRISIS

Bernard Lietaer is partner in our network of experts. His specialty are monetary systems. Together with Dr. Robert Ulanowicz and Dr. Sally Goerner in March 2009 he published Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis in SAPIENS. The article offers a clear analysis of the present financial crisis - and incorporates a very interesting, efficient and effective recommendation for how chief sales executives can protect sales of their companies - in spite of the crisis.

As appetizer we offer - with friendly permission of Bernard Lietaer - a brief excerpt from his paper. We urge you to download and study the whole document. It contains extremely valuable insight in the actual crisis you - the Chief Sales Officer - face, and what you should do about it.

THE "REAL" ECONOMY WILL PREDICTABLY BECOME THE NEXT VICTIM OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

Whatever governments do for the banks, credit will be a lot harder for companies to obtain from banks for years to come. Once a domino effect plays out in the real economy, when a chain of bankruptcies is started with all its effects on unemployment and other social problems, it will turn out even harder to stop than the dominos in the banking system. It is futile to hope that governments will be in a position to save even important businesses after having born the cost of bailing out the banks. However, there is something that companies can do themselves to avoid the worst aspects of this problem. It is possible for companies to lead themselves out of this crisis.

THE FAIRY TALE OF THE SIXTEEN BRAVE BUSINESS LEADERS

Imagine that during a crisis similar to the one we are now mired, sixteen businessmen got together to decide what they could do among themselves. They or their clients had each received a notice from their respective banks that their credit line was going to be reduced or eliminated; hence bankruptcy was only a question of time. They realized that business A had needed the bank loan to buy goods from business B, which in turn needed money to buy stuff from its own suppliers. So they decided to create a mutual credit system among themselves, inviting their clients and suppliers to join. When business A buys something from B, A gets a debit and B the corresponding credit. They created their own currency, whose value was identical to the national money, but with the interesting feature that it didn’t bear interest.

The country’s banks mounted a massive press campaign to try to squelch this revolutionary idea. Miraculously, that campaign failed, and this little system saved the businesses involved at the time. A cooperative was set up among the users to keep the accounts dealing with that currency. Soon participants could also borrow from that cooperative in that currency at the remarkably low interest rate of 1% to 1.5%. All such loans need to backed by inventory or other collateral. Over time, the system grew to include up to one quarter of all the businesses of the entire country.

Sixty-five years later, an American professor performed an econometric study proving that the secret for the country’s legendary economic stability was that strange little unofficial currency, circulating among businesses in parallel with the national money. That country’s well-known economic resilience was usually credited to some mysterious and unknown national characteristic. Whenever there was a recession, the volume of activity in this unofficial currency would expand significantly, thereby reducing the recession’s impact on sales and unemployment. Whenever there was a boom, business in national currency expanded, while activity in the unofficial currency proportionally dropped back again. The surprising implication of this study is that the spontaneous counter-cyclical behavior of this little “unorthodox” system actually helped the central bank of the country in its efforts to stabilize the economy.

NOT A FAIRY TALE - A TRUE STORY

This story is not an urban legend, but the true story of the WIR system. The country is Switzerland and the sixteen founders met in Zurich in the year 1934. And the system is still operating today. The annual volume of business in the WIR currency is now about $2 billion per year. The American professor is James Stodder from Rensselaer University. His remarkable quantitative study uses more than 60 years of high quality data to prove the points made in this story. The WIR system is also now accepting deposits and making loans in Swiss Francs, as well as in WIR. Interestingly, a proposal has recently been made in the Swiss Parliament to have the government accept payment of taxes in the WIR currency, as a way to dampen the effects of the banking crisis on the overall economy. Such a measure would indeed be the most powerful way for the Swiss government to support a more widespread acceptance of the WIR in all segments of society.

TAKE THE INITIATIVE - NOW!

You recognize the value of such a system? Take the initiative NOW! Meet with your customers and suppliers. Study jointly the WIR System. And use such a model as the solution to protect sales in this time of the financial crisis. Protecting sales - the is your job as Chief Sales Officer.

With the IT tools available today such a system can be started with a fraction of the cost it took to start the original concept in Switzerland.

WORKSHOP FOR CHIEF SALES OFFICERS

In 2009 we offer our workshop for Chief Sales Officers UNBLOCK THE POWER OF YOUR SALES FORCE! twice:

On September 22, 2009 in Geneva (Switzerland) in English language and
on November 4, 2009 in Linz (Austria) in German language.

This workshop is an intensive work day on which participants first get an introduction to the principles of constraint-focused operational sales leadership. Then, participants apply the related methodologies to their own sales leadership situation.

Here you may download a datasheet about this sales leadership workshop - and here you may register.