Chapter 5
Obstacle #2: But I Don't Want to Sell
Moving Past Willy Loman
A fire hydrant of a man, Chuck Alpine stood square, brimming with the kind of red-faced passion you'd expect from a former TV star and bodybuilder-cum-fitness club entrepreneur.
I could sell a ketchup popsicle to a lady wearing white gloves in the middle of July. You can be goddamn sure I can sell gym memberships.
The room grew quiet.
Chuck sat at the head of a heavy boardroom table in a small windowless room. Behind him, a two-foot, all-gold screaming eagle rested on a counter. To his right hung a poster, featuring an elephant on its feet reaching for tree leaves; underneath was the phrase: “Goals: The difference between try and triumph is a little umph.”
Chuck owns a chain of fitness clubs spread across the industrial Midwest. He was born in Texas, so it's not surprising that his clubs are big, mostly retrofits of old supermarkets, full of dozens of treadmills, TRX-friendly superstructures, even wind tunnels for cooling off.
He's explaining his successful twenty-seven-club chain to investors, a pair of thirty-somethings scribbling notes.
“I grew up in the fitness business. Started in Texas out of high school. Then moved to southern California. This is a sales business. Don't let anyone tell you differently. MBAs'll tell you clubs are about retention, that we lose half our customers a year, but that's bull crap. The only way this business works is if you get out on the floor and sell.”
A slim man wearing chinos and a dark blue blazer lifts his head up from a yellow pad. “Tell us more about your customer acquisition strategy. How are you able to teach associates how to sell so effectively?”
Chuck squints at the man, a vein popping up under his leathery skin.
“You run contests. We always have a summer contest where the clubs compete against each other for a big trip. We make it a big deal. I bring the best team up on a stage and if they win, we give them each a Stetson and talk about how much a stud they are. But it's about human psychology, too. If someone walks in the door and I'm going to sell them, I always show them around the club. I want to talk about our pool and show them how clean the locker rooms are, but I also want to soften them up before I sit them down in the sales pit.”
Chuck warms to his story, a smile starting to crawl across his face. He leans back, fingers laced behind his head. His hair is shiny, like he might use product.
“I ask them what their goals are. Most important part of the pitch. Do they want to lose weight? Are they looking to spice up their social life? Do they have a reunion coming up? There's always something. I use that to sell. I store it in my brain for later if they start to object. They might say, for example, ‘That's too much for my budget.’
“I say, ‘I understand,’ and then I get all sad looking and say, ‘I thought you were serious about losing weight because you wanted to get back out there. You serious about getting back out there?’ I tie it back to what they said their motivation was. It's not my motivation, it's their motivation and once they give that up to me, I can just beat them around the ears with it. I've never had it not work,” he says, his black eyes pushing out to make the point. “I always tell our guys if you can't sell $2,000 worth of personal training to a forty-five-year-old lawyer who has a paunch, just got divorced and is looking to meet women, you aren't really trying.”
You've met Chuck before—maybe not at the fitness club but at the auto dealership or condo sales office. There are Chucks all around us, and they are our second obstacle because we don't want to be Chuck.
Do you agree? What do you think of the woman at the dealership who tries to upsell you to the cold-weather package and undercarriage protection? The guy at the mall jewelry store that peers over the glass counter and says, “We find a good rule of thumb is that you should spend about three months' salary on an engagement ring. Not sure what you make, but I wanted to show you this $15,000 princess cut.”
Be honest because it is helpful to put a name on what you do not want to be.
If you are like us, you think of salespeople as the bottom-feeders of commerce. In a charitable moment, we might think they are a necessary evil at car dealerships and mall jewelry stores, but we'd be quick to say that there is no room for a salesperson in consulting or professional services. That is because we think our world is above salespeople. We “engage” with would-be clients. We don't sell. Selling is manipulative.
We're not alone in this view. Every year the Gallup Poll conducts a survey asking which professions are thought to be honest and ethical. Estimable professions include nurses, pharmacists, doctors, engineers, fire fighters, and clergy. At the other end of the spectrum skulk members of Congress, HMO managers, and—you knew this was coming—salespeople. The lowest seven professions included car salespeople, insurance salespeople, advertising executives, and stockbrokers.
That is because most of us believe that sales is the art of:
Causing someone to take an action they wouldn't take if left to their own devices.
It's no wonder we think of salespeople as odious and can't imagine joining their ranks.
Why We Can Never Imagine Being Salespeople
Most people dislike the idea of “selling” because selling sits at the intersection of the following three ideas.
Why We Dislike Selling
Most of us think sales is:
- Wrong: Consulting and professional service providers feel like selling is inconsistent with their commitment to professional ethics. If selling means causing others to do what they might not do if left to their own devices, and professionalism is doing what is best for the client at all times, then there is an inherent conflict between selling and being a professional.
- Ineffective: Nearly all the consulting and professional services pros we interviewed said they felt that traditional sales techniques wouldn't work on their clients. Unlike the old door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales pitch perfected in the 1950s, no one dumps dirt on the carpet of a potential client's office to demonstrate the effectiveness of their vacuum cleaner/digital transformation. We spoke with Jane Pierce, who left ADM to start a consulting practice. She remembers what it was like to get calls from salespeople as a potential client. “I wouldn't even take a call. I had a guard dog that blocked out all of those calls. I figured if I needed something, I'd go out and look for it. In the meantime, I didn't have the time.”
- Difficult: Sales is hard work. Salespeople cold call, knock on the doors of people they don't know, bear near-constant rejection. Sales is out of our comfort zone. We know accounting, the law, or IT security, but not how to sell that knowledge.
To put a cherry on all this, most of us harbor feelings that sales is déclassé and beneath us.
I don't want to be called a salesperson. That feels more like the woman at Lord & Taylor in a white blouse and black skirt helping you buy a pocketbook.
—Audrey Cramer, Vice Chairman,Cushman and Wakefield
We are told that people who have higher degrees manage salespeople. They are never salespeople themselves. Most professionals resolve the cognitive dissonance between the need to grow their business and their feelings that sales is inappropriate to consulting and professional services practices by taking a hard line against sales.
Walt Shill, formerly of McKinsey and Accenture, shared this story:
A long time ago at McKinsey, before paved roads and electricity, we didn't use the word ‘sell.’ We didn't even use the word sales. We recorded professional fees and so there was this view that clients have problems and we need to discover, understand, and tackle them. And the way you do that is you build relationships and you demonstrate the capability to solve problems. And then once people realize you help them solve problems, then they will come back.
The Birth of Management Consulting
A kid from Cleveland, Marvin Bower put himself through Brown by working for a law firm that specialized in debt collection in the wholesale hardware business. He quickly realized that showing up at a warehouse and talking to the owner was more effective than sending dunning notices on ornate legal stationery. He'd sit down with the executives and reason with them, explaining the costs of going to court and the virtues of working through the problem with a payment plan. Later, on the advice of his father, Marvin enrolled in Harvard Law School. Getting into Harvard Law wasn't hard then, but as he liked to say, staying in was. “They flunked people all the time.”
After graduation, he had his heart set on joining Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue, the most prestigious law firm in Cleveland, but didn't have the grades. Instead, he enrolled in Harvard Business School, thinking it would make him unique to have both a law and business degree. It did, and upon graduation, he joined Jones Day as a young associate. By this time, companies were starting to get sucked under by the Depression. With his experience in debt collection and his education in law and business, he was soon given the assignment of chairing bankruptcy committees and charged with reorganizing companies like TRW, Studebaker, and Midland Steel.
What he found shocked him. Ten out of the eleven companies he worked with shouldn't have failed. And they wouldn't have if only the CEO had access to the right information. Front-line employees, who saw the truth of their business, were blocked by fear and hierarchy from telling truth to power. The culprit was cultural, not economic.
Marvin's career was going well when, as so often happens with entrepreneurs, bad news forced him in a different direction. Jones Day announced they would be cutting salaries by twenty-five percent. Marvin and his wife sat in an ice cream parlor because it was all they could afford, and decided to move to Chicago, where Marvin joined a small managerial accounting and business analysis firm called McKinsey & Co. Six years later, James McKinsey died unexpectedly and Marvin Bower, along with a partner named A. Tom Kearney, decided to buy the business and focus on helping companies better manage themselves with information and advice.
Marvin's vision was clear: create a professional firm that served clients with the same level of high integrity as law and accounting firms. To him, there was a clear gap in the market. Law firms advised on legal matters, investment bankers on capital, but who was there to advise on how to best manage a company? McKinsey & Co. (and later A.T. Kearney) stepped into the void and the profession now known as management consulting was born.
Marvin took over the helm of McKinsey in 1932 when it had eighteen employees. When he stepped down as managing director in 1967, McKinsey had five hundred employees. Today, that number has swelled to more than 20 thousand.
This type of management consulting was clearly needed, and by any measure, McKinsey & Co. is a very successful company. What's interesting is that even though McKinsey has grown steadily over the years, the company has always taken a dim view of sales. Marvin explained in a 1951 training program, “It is our policy not to solicit clients or advertise our services, not because it is unethical, but because to do so is inconsistent with the professional approach. We can't advertise our services and solicit clients without making implied promises of what we can do for clients. Since we do not, at the outset, know what we can accomplish, such promises do not meet high professional standards.” This philosophy permeates the company, and it gives us an important insight into how we must adjust our mindset to help us think about selling professional services as not really selling at all. For Marvin and for McKinsey, the delivery of quality work was the alpha and omega of business development. Do good work, and your reputation will grow your business.
We Are the Product
We believe the historical aversion to the term selling has a lot to do with the fact that in professional services, we are the product. Unlike those who sell sophisticated software systems to the Fortune 500 or advanced imaging systems to large hospitals, we are selling ourselves. It seems boastful or distasteful to promote ourselves. We've been taught since kindergarten not to be a braggart.
There's a strong, long-held view among the professional services that selling ourselves is unseemly. Promoting ourselves is too crass. Too commercial. Too hucksterish. Many, if not most, of us in professional services have felt this way at some point.
We believe there is a strong need for a better understanding of how to promote ourselves in a way that is effective and professional.