Sacred sales

For better or worse, sales is a sacred domain inside an organization.
Except for some companies, sales holds the most raw customer information, and the company's fate rests with them.

No matter how great a measure you have, if sales doesn't move you can't acquire customers.
Conversely, to design measures you need to learn customer problems through sales.
And no matter what process you follow, if sales closes in the end, it's all okay. Sales is sacred.

Sacred or not, you can also systematize sales — Salesforce's The Model is a well-known example.
Design the sales flow, clarify what they should do, and make it visible. On the other hand, what makes a salesperson who can sell is hard to put into objective language no matter how hard you try. That part depends on personal skill and can't be fully systematized. It stays sacred.

But if one key to making an organization work — not only in sales — is how far you can divide labor and systematize, then sacred parts should be as few as possible.

The downside of sacred sales shows up in cases like this:
A long-tenured salesperson says, "Customers often care about XX, so let's sell that we can provide a solution for XX."
But that proposal may only be their vague image — and even if it isn't wrong, they may not have accurately put the problem into words.
Still, nobody can interfere with a proposal from sacred sales. It's "sacred" because it's based on the customer's voice.
Vague proposals that aren't accurately verbalized are even harder for other departments to picture, and get executed as even vaguer measures.

The result is unclear, self-satisfying promotion. (Sadly, when that happens, the marketing team is the one held responsible.)

This is only a hypothetical, but it's not far-fetched — it can happen at many companies. Especially when there's a loud salesperson with long experience.
Because they actually hear the customer's voice, sales is the most important role and becomes something like the "fulcrum" inside the company. Even so, being yanked around by a godlike one-word decree instead of a crane's cry is the worst outcome. I want to keep the principle: grasp customer needs accurately and respond in the most fitting way.