Ralph Muse, a fellow Texan, ex-Booz Allen management consultant, extremely experienced interim manager, extremely respectable father, and honored serviceman (among many other impressive things) recently started up a blog, and one of my favorite posts by him is entitled, "Super Salesman CEOs". The post is written in the context of trying to place a CEO in a startup, but I feel the post also reflects the situation in numerous client engagements I have seen, for example in cases where more mature companies are looking to enter new businesses or develop new product platforms. In Ralph’s post, he writes (bracketed text mine):
[An executive search firm] needed help finding the perfect person for a CEO search. The position description called for someone who had spent their whole career in Sales …
I have heard this request before. It seams to be a trend. While I think every good CEO is a salesman, not every sales VP can be a good CEO. If fact for most startups after the salesperson “makes the sale” the CEO will have to close the deal by convincing the customer that the company has a sound business strategy that will succeed.
One take that I have on this situation is that visionary and "salesy" (for lack of a better word) CEOs need to find someone or someway to complement their strengths if the CEO lacks execution skills, strong lieutenants, and/or the time and bandwidth to employ structured methods for tackling problems. I have seen a number of efforts fail or get stalled because they overlook some of the soft stuff to get businesses to work, like team building (as Ralph mentions). See Ralph’s post for more.