J-Lo is an undeniable talent. I will not be taking questions on this.

That skin. That hair. Those bodysuits. That ability to make the whole world care about a green Versace dress, a Super Bowl halftime show, a perfume empire, a rom-com, a tabloid romance, a comeback, and then another comeback. Jenny from the Block has range.

And yet, somehow, Gigli exists. A film that required her to deliver the line: “It’s turkey time. Gobble, gobble.” The line has become part of the film’s unfortunate legacy, including in coverage of its famously bad reception and Razzie sweep.

This is useful to remember because not even Queen Meryl could turn that into a moment of great cinema. But the line is not really the point. By the time an actor is saying something that indefensible on screen, a long chain of decisions has already been made. Someone allegedly chose the concept. Someone shaped the story. Someone approved the tone. Someone decided what audience the film was for, what it was trying to be, and why anyone should care.  

J-Lo is simply where all of those tragic choices become visible.

That is often how sales teams experience commercial strategy. They are the ones in front of the customer, carrying the conversation, reading the room and absorbing the reaction. So when performance softens, it is tempting to look at the most visible part of the system and conclude that delivery is the problem. Sometimes it is. But often, by the time the sales force is being blamed for execution, the real failure has already happened upstream. 

Sales teams are often the first place organisations look when commercial performance begins to soften because sales activity is visible, measurable and easy to interrogate. The numbers arrive quickly, sit neatly in dashboards and appear to offer a clean diagnosis. Segmentation decisions, targeting assumptions and positioning choices are much harder to examine because they were made months earlier, often in workshops, brand plans, leadership discussions or strategy decks that now feel distant from the problem at hand.

As a result, the conversation moves quickly to execution: more activity, more accountability, stronger incentives, tougher performance management, a refreshed sales contest, a sharper culture. Sometimes those interventions are warranted, but often they are treating the symptom rather than the cause. If you are asking the wrong representative to call on the wrong customer with the wrong message, you do not have a sales execution issue. You have a strategy issue.

This is particularly common in organisations where marketing develops the strategy, sales carries the number, and the post-mortem happens without meaningful field input. The sales force becomes the final point of accountability for a series of decisions in which it had limited involvement. And, let’s be honest, they are usually not in the room to defend themselves.

The root cause is frequently a breakdown in the logic of segmentation, targeting and positioning. Most senior commercial leaders understand the language of STP, so the issue is rarely conceptual awareness. The problem is that the framework is often treated as a sequence of slides rather than a sequence of choices. Segmentation becomes an insight exercise. Targeting becomes a volume cut. Positioning becomes a message house. The connective tissue between them is where the strategy either holds or falls apart.

Many organisations segment extensively. They build sophisticated frameworks. Customers are categorised by demographics, behaviours, attitudes, needs states, prescribing patterns, purchasing habits, digital engagement, funnel position or some combination thereof. The work is often rigorous and intellectually interesting. Then, somewhere between the insight deck and the field plan, the richness collapses.

The sales team receives an A, B, C list based largely on volume. Behavioural nuance is loosely described. Strategic priority is implied rather than decided. The operating question becomes, “Who is big?” rather than, “Who are we most likely to win, why are they worth prioritising, and what proposition gives us the right to win with them?”

Targeting is where strategy starts to bite because it requires real choices about which customers matter most, which customers matter less, and where finite organisational resources will be concentrated. It also requires the discipline to say no, or at least, “not now.” This is where many organisations hesitate. They declare a target segment, but leave it broad enough to avoid discomfort. They want the benefits of focus without the politics of exclusion.

The result is a target audience that remains too heterogeneous to guide meaningful action. Customers inside the so-called priority segment may have different motivations, different barriers, different levels of engagement, different buying triggers and different definitions of value. Or worse, there is no real targeting at all. Marketing has not made choices, which is a lovely invitation for sales to go wherever they like.

Positioning then becomes almost impossible because positioning is not a slogan in search of an audience. It is a deliberate answer to a specific customer problem, framed against a specific competitive alternative, for a specific group of customers the organisation has chosen to prioritise. When the target audience is too broad, the positioning becomes broad as well.

The organisation starts talking in generalities. The value proposition becomes diluted. Messages become interchangeable or they travel so far up the benefit ladder to the land where QOL claims are merely an abstraction.  

A representative with twenty years of experience may be told they lack urgency, when what they really lack is a compelling commercial story. A team may be instructed to increase call rates, when what they actually need is sharper guidance on who matters most and why. A sales leader may be asked to drive accountability, when the deeper issue is that the strategic choices themselves were never sufficiently resolved.

None of this is a defence of poor sales execution. Field discipline, capability, coaching, activity quality, incentives and accountability all matter, but they matter within a system. Sales performance is an organisational outcome before it is an individual one, shaped not only by effort and skill in the field, but also by the quality of the choices the organisation has made about where to play, how to win, what to prioritise and what to stop doing.

The sales force operates within the system it is given. If segmentation is weak, targeting becomes imprecise. If targeting is imprecise, positioning becomes generic. If positioning is generic, messaging loses relevance. When messaging loses relevance, the field starts to improvise, and head office often reads that improvisation as poor execution or non-compliance.

Before redesigning the incentive plan, launching another recognition program or questioning the capability of the sales team, organisations should ask a few harder questions. Can the field identify the target customer without opening the segmentation deck? Does the positioning change meaningfully between priority customer groups? Has the organisation spent as much time debating customer choice as it has spent debating sales execution? Is the field being asked to deliver a differentiated message, or simply to add charisma to a generic one?

Execution remains critical, but execution cannot rescue an unfocused strategy indefinitely. Before blaming the sales force, it is worth considering whether the sales force is being asked to execute a strategy that was never sufficiently focused in the first place.

Because when strategy fails to make clear choices, that failure does not remain hidden for long. The sales team simply becomes the place where everyone can see it.

Or, to return to J-Lo, sometimes the problem is not the person standing in the spotlight. Sometimes the concept was wrong, the audience was unclear, the story inane, and someone still expected the performer to make it work.