By Kim Michael Published The American Salesman 2013.
Some years ago I attended a business leadership meeting of a medical collections company. In that meeting one of the operations directors stood up and asked a question about a pending sales contract, and she prefaced her remarks by saying, “I’m not a salesperson and I don’t want to be.”
Bob (not his real name), an older man who reputedly had been the CFO of a local hospital system and newly hired to the sales staff, shook his head and flippantly said, ‘’Yea, well who does?”
Everyone laughed…except me. My immediate impulse was one of anger and my first thought was, “If you don’t want to be salesman, you don’t need to be in sales”. But confronting him would not have benefited either of us, not to mention that it goes against one of my own cardinal rules and that is to never to react out of anger.
Even so, I find it interesting, and actually more than a little frustrating, that many people are reluctant to admit that they are in sales, as if it was a profession to be looked down on. I also find it interesting that people who are not in sales, often believe that sales is a catch all profession for those who can’t succeed at doing anything else. And of course the greatest curiosity of all are “those” individuals who consider themselves experts in a particular field and think that it automatically makes them experts in selling products or services in that field.
In all three cases they are wrong. Professional Sales is a discipline as complex and demanding as law, or medicine, or any other professional career. Certainly it requires a thorough knowledge of the product or service that is being sold, but that is just the beginning and not the end. A true sales professional is a consultant, a physiologist, a business strategist, a teacher, a negotiator, a magician, and so much more.
From the first moment mankind realized that he had to rely on the products and skills of others to survive, and the idea of universal currency came along, sales (and salespeople) have been the great intersection of human need and satisfaction of that need.
The great wheels of industry do not even begin to turn until something is sold. The greatest developments in civilization have come, not from the innovators who made those discoveries, but by those who followed; the pioneers of sales, who, in their own right, turned those discoveries into goods and services that everyone could enjoy. Technology, food, spices, hard and soft commodities, culture; everything that has taken our civilization to the next level, is in part, the result of a salesperson somewhere along the line. These are history’s true unspoken heroes for they have transformed our lives by making the greatest discoveries accessible and attainable to the common man.
Given that fact, it still surprises me how few people respect people in sales and yet, truth be known, without salespeople, most of them would wake up tomorrow and not have jobs.
The one demise of great salespeople, unlike any other professional discipline, is they make what they do look easy. Business owners and managers often undervalue their sales people because they think that any one can do it. It seems the people who benefit the most from having successful salespeople are often the ones who appreciate them the least, and when management begins undervaluing its sales force, the first to go in the downward spiral is their best salespeople. True, they may be able to struggle by with only marginal people, but the true metric of business (and of failure) is not where you are, but where you could have been. Some of the greatest losses in the commercial history are footnoted by the simple reality that there will always be those who think you can kill the goose and still get the golden eggs.
So returning to the story of the CFO who made the comment “So who does?” That one comment capsulated everything that he was, and moreover, everything he was not.
I watched him arrogantly make call after call without success sometimes forty or fifty in a day. All his experience in the medical industry and in finance foundered miserably on the rocks and after six months, he had only set one meeting and after eight months had still sold nothing.
His four word comment, “Yea, well who does?” defined him adequately. He did not want to be a salesperson and he found out, as did everyone else did, that he wasn’t one.
Another month went by and he was let go. I happened to pass by his office as he packed up his things, slamming them into a card board box, still arrogantly blaming everyone but himself.
It is not surprising. Less than a few percentage points of the people who are experts in any given field, even those who create the new frontiers in products or services, will actually benefit from them. The reason is simple. Selling is not product driven, but people driven. The best product in the world in the hands of someone who does not know how to interact and influence people, will go no where, which only goes to prove that the most important element in the sales process is not the product or service that is being sold, it is the salesperson who is selling it.
As we begin the journey into understanding sales and more importantly the fundamental elements that make up the true sales professional, you will begin to see beyond the moment of a sales event and see it rather as an intersection of many different converging pathways. Success or failure does not begin with the sale…it begins with the salesperson.
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