Odd, isn’t it, that so few marketing books have chapters on selling in them, when without sales revenue we are all dead and buried, however brilliant our marketing plans? In Guerilla Marketing, Jay Conrad Levinson talks about salespeople as a breed of commission-only mercenaries: ‘if they ask for a salary, be nice to them and say no’. The word ‘salesman’ is not always meant as a compliment. When someone is described as a ‘bit of a salesman’ it implies they are a sharp-talking huckster who’ll stop at nothing to get a deal. And in the sub-prime mortgage selling of complex ‘financial instruments’ to whomever the City salesmen could offload the things, we saw the worst side of selling. The City and telesales between them have damaged the reputation of selling more than anything else.
Your customers’ trust in you is your most precious asset.
But most salespeople are straight people whose careers depend on them being trusted by their customers. They are, and seek to be seen as, professionals. This chapter aims to put right the poor image some spoilers have given the profession once and for all, and to re-establish the salesperson as a key and leading member of the marketing team.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, describes salespeople as people capable of spreading ideas. He says:
‘It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likeability. It’s all those things and something more’
The something more, he’d say, is ‘irresistibility’. But Malcolm is American and he is seduced by the American vision of selling, which he more fully describes in What the Dog Saw – a collection of his New Yorker articles in which he describes the art form of QVC Shopping Channel ‘pitching’ as immortalised by genius salespeople such as Ron Popeil. Gladwell tells the story of how, in just his first hour on live TV (demonstrating, presenting, cooking and taking phone-ins), pitching the new, promotional version of the Showtime Rotisserie, Ron sold a record $1 million of product:
‘It was one thing to talk about how Ron was the best there ever was … but quite another thing to see proof of it before your very eyes … (enter Ron Popeil from the TV studio after that first hour) … there was a hush and then the whole room stood up and cheered.’
The hair at the back of my neck stands up when I read this. It would for anyone who’s sold or pitched.
One day you’ll get that sense of being an unstoppably compelling salesperson – train for that day.
There’s a heady moment when you can visualise nothing stopping you and no one capable of presenting you with an objection you can’t sweep aside or, better, twist to your laughing advantage. You feel immortal and at one with yourself. You are unscripted but feel as though you are presenting a divine script and you enjoy being in your own company. You want people to buy from you because it feels like the right, the only, thing to do.
Salespeople are not whingers (and if they are they won’t last long). Selling is the last bastion of optimism and opportunism.
A salesperson of high-ticket merchandise to commercial customers will be different from someone working in retail, as will a salesperson working with a big brand company where reputation and trust have been built over time. Someone selling medical equipment or high-tech products is a sales consultant whose primary objective is to create a relationship, not achieve a one-off sales transaction.
No one effective in sales today aspires to be anything less than:
To be a brilliant salesperson, be an expert, a businessman and a brilliant presenter.
Increasingly top salespeople are global salespeople too. The premium this puts on being a profoundly knowledgeable and compelling presenter of a product portfolio is obvious. In government circles the belief that ‘being better at selling is the single most important thing we can do for the economy’ has taken deep root.
The other side of selling is more rational but, in a topsy-turvy world, critical. And that’s the ability to juggle, predict and do a tightrope walk all at the same time. All great salespeople are great at planning and understanding their customers’ businesses and they have an intuition about timing. The time when it’s right to push, when it’s right to make a concession and when it’s right to stop.
Great sales planning is about breaking down a sales forecast into manageable, meaningful chunks. A target of £1 million breaks down to £4,500 a working day (or just £550 an hour). It represents £10,000 a customer if you have 100 of them. It spreads a lot of ways.
Targets are never fair nor are they precisely scientific. They represent the opportunity for a good salesperson to work out ‘how to’, not to wonder ‘if’.
Working out how to use time, your local knowledge and your customer base to achieve a sales target requires a skill and positivism you’ll need to develop.
The art of sales planning lies right at the heart of brilliant marketing because, however good a marketing plan, it won’t happen if the people selling to customers aren’t motivated and equipped to do the job. The relationship between a salesperson and a marketer is like that between an actor and a producer. The latter gets everything in place but the actor has to be given a good script, proper direction and the room to interpret what will work for the audience.
Plans should not be short-term things, however the economy booms and busts. Brilliant salespeople are playing a two-handed game. On the left-hand side filling the sales pipeline, getting orders, confirming orders and following up. That’s the transactional stuff. And on the right-hand side developing and building relationships, acquiring competitive and marketplace intelligence and creating a sales framework for the future. That’s the intelligent stuff.
Selling is marketing in action. Marketing people need to spend more time with salespeople.
Professional salespeople always have a plan and know how to use their time and the opportunities so their performance is never erratic. We spend too little time praising salespeople. And marketing people spend too little time on a one-to-one basis understanding and working out with salespeople how to tap into the real opportunities in the marketplace and build partnerships with key customers. It’s time that changed.
Listen to your salespeople. Ask what their customers want, why, what for, how much and do not patronise or confuse them. Give them what their customers want and need.
Why I hate high-tech shops
The real lesson here is that the guys in shops do not speak my language and make me feel everything’s my fault, not theirs. They are not salespeople; they are the equivalent of traffic wardens, there to stop you doing anything the store dislikes. They are there to upsell, cross-sell and confuse. And they don’t want my money … they do not want me to ‘buy happy’(as Norwich Union put it). When we went to buy a computer for my wife we came home empty-handed, frustrated and bemused. I called my IT man who came round, he sat with my wife, chatted through what she needed and we shopped online through Laptops Direct. It took 20 minutes. We spent £500. The kit arrived the next day. It wasn’t hard.
Here are some examples of how selling is changing:
The world is getting faster. It’s time to work out how you can speed up what you do. Speed gives you sales edge.
In running a small business the owner or the boss will be the primary salesperson. They will have the benefit of being especially passionate and knowledgeable about their product or service. All they have to learn is how to be distinctive and effective as a presenter.
The essential skills are no different, but in a small business we are looking less for a polished professional and more for the sort of person Margaret Heffernan, author of Women on Top and the champion of women entrepreneurs, describes as having an ‘irrational love of their customers’. In a small business someone who spends money with you is literally keeping you alive. In small businesses the simple art of selling yourself and your product is at the heart of marketing, not a service to it. That’s what Ron Popeil did on QTV. That’s what great leaders of business can still do. It’s what made Steve Jobs so compelling a leader. He was a great salesman and he positioned Apple as an accessible business bringing you magical products. Ron and Steve had a lot more in common than anyone might think.
Love your customers and love the fun of telling them the story about your product and company service.
Often the best salespeople wouldn’t recognise it if you told them they were great salespeople. But they all have the following things in common:
The reputation of selling has taken two knocks – from telesales and from financial salesmen offloading exotic ‘instruments’. But at its core, and ignoring these mavericks, selling is a noble profession and becoming more important.
Technology is transforming everything, most of all our access to information and the ability it confers on our getting faster and faster in responding to customers. Delivery times are getting shorter. But one thing is not changing: the need for face-to-face contact. Real human beings rule and sell OK.
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