I flew from the East Coast to Europe to speak at a big conference, and we got sales leads there. I was sitting there with my sales guy, and I didn't like something he was doing on the calls - I forget what exactly, but something didn't sit right with me.
I couldn't quite articulate what was going wrong, so I just I started dialing up a bunch of people myself. "Hi, this is Sebastian... yeah, me, I run things around here... anyway, how'd you like the talk? Oh cool. Anything I could've done better? No? Nothing? Come on now, don't mess with me dude. Oh, that is interesting, thank you. Anyways, I wonder if our company can make your life better. Where you at right now? Uh-huh... and how about this particular solution? Uh-huh... yeah mate, I got something good I reckon we could do for you."
People love hearing from the high-ups in a company. And you completely lose track of real life if you're not actively spending time in the trenches. That means doing any role you yourself can do periodically, and buying tea/Japanese food for engineers and technical people whose jobs you don't understand, while really testing their patience with your dumbass, Luddite questions. And constantly reminding them that you know you're a Luddite, but you really want to understand what the hell is going on in the trenches anyways.
Call people. They love it. You won't come across as desperate unless you actually are desperate, and even then, the desperation vibe will fall off if you call even more people.
I'm totally in favor of having higher-ups help existing customers (I know a few companies that do this, and I like it too).
I'd even be OK with a CEO sitting in on late game sales calls/meetings, but that's a whole different issue than having a CEO make cold calls (or even having a CEO on early sales calls). It gives the impression of a one-man shop, which prospective clients will, in most cases, try to avoid.
YMMV, but with a larger operation having the CEO get involved in customer engagements that don't mean either closing a big sale or ensuring one isn't lost causes most clients to assume the CEO is their buddy.
This means he's now their go-to guy for the most trivial of issues. Besides being a PITA for the boss this also effectively neuters the account team. Not ideal.
Quality is quality, no matter how many people work at the company. Often it is preferable to do business with a one man shop versus Megacorp, because the guy/girl you are dealing with will do what it takes to keep your business.
Not being facetious actually - the finer details of technical work and engineering evolve so rapidly that there's a really, really good chance you don't know how any given engineer does what he does. You should understand the basic objective of his job, certainly - but let's take for example someone whose whole job is to get data and analytics and prepare recommendations for marketing based on them. You get the idea - this person gives you thoughts on what's selling, what isn't, and how you can do better. But what the hell are they doing, really, actually? More sophisticated analytics and datamining are constantly becoming available, and if you don't read up on it, how would you know?
How many CEOs right now know about "canonical" now being recognized by search engines? That's the kind of thing one of your people can explain to you - "Check this out boss, we now set the canonical entry for each piece, and we control which links show up in the search engine when we put out 3-4 similar versions. I've spent the last few days updating all our archives, so you should see more consistency when current users and outside people search through the archives." And then the boss goes - "Whoa, that's awesome. Party on." Or at least that's how it should work! Airline CEOs who never do flightattending have doomed companies. Those that do have a fighting chance.
I couldn't quite articulate what was going wrong, so I just I started dialing up a bunch of people myself. "Hi, this is Sebastian... yeah, me, I run things around here... anyway, how'd you like the talk? Oh cool. Anything I could've done better? No? Nothing? Come on now, don't mess with me dude. Oh, that is interesting, thank you. Anyways, I wonder if our company can make your life better. Where you at right now? Uh-huh... and how about this particular solution? Uh-huh... yeah mate, I got something good I reckon we could do for you."
People love hearing from the high-ups in a company. And you completely lose track of real life if you're not actively spending time in the trenches. That means doing any role you yourself can do periodically, and buying tea/Japanese food for engineers and technical people whose jobs you don't understand, while really testing their patience with your dumbass, Luddite questions. And constantly reminding them that you know you're a Luddite, but you really want to understand what the hell is going on in the trenches anyways.
Call people. They love it. You won't come across as desperate unless you actually are desperate, and even then, the desperation vibe will fall off if you call even more people.