Amateurs and Professionals

A major corporation that manufactures and sells household cleaning products had a particularly interesting experience. During the 1980s, the company’s products were distributed by two sales forces: One, comprising about 60 salespeople, was responsible for sales to the superretailers, while the other team, comprising about 25 salespeople, looked after customers at independent hardware stores.

When, bit by bit, hardware stores disappeared from the city centers, the corporation was obliged to shed the jobs of the sales force catering to those customers. Its managing director faced a dilemma: whether to lay off the salespeople concerned or to redeploy them to the superstore clientele, entrusting each of them with about 20 large retail outlets within a particular geographical area. There was a great risk that these salespeople, used to friendly discussions with often elderly retailers, would “buckle” under the pressure of the buyers employed by the superretailers such as Walmart, Tesco, Lowe’s, and Aldi.

Thus when the corporation opted not to lay off the salespeople but to assign them to its superstore clientele, a decision was made to institute extremely strict management monitoring. It needed to ensure that the transfer of these new salespeople to the superretailers sector did not lead to a surge in rebates, discounts, and other bargain terms. In this regard, comparing the terms negotiated by these salespeople to the results achieved by the true “pros” in superstore sales might have seemed a little unfair to the new appointees.

Yet against all expectations, the initial findings revealed not a decline in the prices achieved by the “novice” salespeople who had been transferred but quite the opposite—and by a clear margin. They were keeping discounts and other commercial benefits under control, and this was not being achieved at the cost of any loss in turnover. The corporation then carried out some proper research in order to find the key to this mystery.

The truth came as a cruel judgment on the superretail “pros.” It became clear that these salespeople, who had a perfect understanding of the way negotiations worked in the superretailer sector, were “conditioned” to such an extent by their customers’ rhetoric that they had become convinced that only “pricing” and “terms and conditions” issues were of interest to buyers. They had “forgotten” their products. They had become “discount sellers.”

In contrast, the salespeople who had come from the “independent retail” sector had retained an attachment to their products. They believed in them. By habit (or by instinct), whenever they were placed in a difficult position by a request for a discount or better commercial terms, they switched the discussion to the topic of the product and its benefits rather than to the terrain of pricing or terms and conditions. They continued to act as sellers of products and services.

Without knowing it, they were applying Golden Rule No. 2.