The Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams was a huge financial success, but it left behind a phrase that has helped to inflict financial mayhem on many businesses: "If you build it, they will come." While the idea worked magically for a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield, it tells us nothing about the importance of building quality into sales programs and sales teams. Without that quality, simply assembling the parts of whatever it is you're selling isn't enough: The customers won't come, and translating good products and services into a great—and highly profitable—business isn't likely to happen.

Our world is more complicated than Hollywood's. The simplistic and erroneous belief that products sell themselves is particularly common in companies that sell technical products, but it happens in every industry. For their own good, it's time product-focused companies dumped the Hollywood mindset and talked earnestly about the importance of sales.

SCORING TOUCHDOWNS. First, let's talk about sales vs. marketing. While often lumped together, each has a distinct function that, hopefully, works hand-in-hand with the other. Marketing creates demand … it facilitates the selling process. Marketing establishes visibility, desire, branding, and a limited sense of a product's value with potential customers. Sales fulfills demand … it facilitates the buying process. Sales builds on intelligent business conversations—and, most importantly, gets the signature on the order.

Think of it in football terms: Marketing may carry the ball down the field, but Sales scores the touchdown. And it is very definitely a team effort, because sales without marketing would be inordinately expensive. Just imagine, for example, asking every person in Ohio if they would like to buy a new and fancy rear-view mirror whose safety advantages have never been explained to them. Well, you might sell a few, but the effort required, and the cost involved, would be enormous. Same thing with marketing: Alert all those Ohioans to the mirror's features and benefits, and you still won't sell very many without skilled salespeople to close the opportunities.

I'll leave the topic of marketing to experts. But on the subject of building a sales program, I'm happy to share the three basic requirements—and the secret ingredient for establishing a great one.

Good sales skills. Just as many people labor under the misconception that writing a column must be easy, since they wrote research papers in school, others assume selling involves nothing more demanding than talking, smiling, and taking customers out to eat at expensive restaurants. Selling is a skill that, for the vast majority of salespeople, has to be learned and mastered. Just as teachers aren't thrown into a classroom and told to figure it out as they go along, nor should salespeople be expected to learn by trial and error.

While you may want to hire trained and experienced sales reps, it's critical to thoroughly train the ones you do hire. Better yet, provide an ongoing sales-training program for the entire team. It will increase sales and reduce turnover—a double win.

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