April 6, 2012
Without sales, companies would not exist. So it is curious that departments such as strategy or marketing are endlessly analyzed by theorists, whereas the front-line of business is often ignored.
Marc Benioff, founder of salesforce.com, a provider of online services to salespeople, complains that sales are largely ignored by business schools and hardly even considered a management subject. Two new books, both of which cite Benioff’s thoughts on sales, are now trying to put that right.
The rise of the internet means sales are changing. Customers bone up about prices online and are less likely to fall for a seductive pitch. Often, there are still huge differences in the performance of sales forces within and between companies.
Many Western corporate bosses are trying to turn sales from an art into more of a science. Entrepreneurial salesmen, doing whatever it takes to reach their numbers, can now be tracked and controlled. Sales Growth: Five Proven Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders, by three McKinsey consultants, belongs in the selling-as-science school.
The book argues that data, process management and outsourcing can do as much for sales departments as for other areas of the corporation. Firms should not hesitate to reengineer their peddlers. They should create sales “factories” where sales teams are ministered to by support people from other disciplines and equip them with computing devices rather than briefcases.
Companies still have plenty of Willy Lomans not selling much. They should seek to standardize performance by finding out what the best salespeople do and making sure everyone applies the same techniques—which sounds obvious, but not many people do it.
In emerging markets, on the other hand, selling is still personal and old-fashioned. So companies that are trying to bring more science to sales at home will still need to master what some call the “steak and a show” method when entering new markets. Industrial sales in China, especially, depend on long, close relationships between salespeople and customers.
Philip Delves Broughton is a British Harvard Business School graduate and author of The Art of the Sale, a descriptive account of the selling business rather than a call to science. One of the characters he writes about is Robert McMurry, an industrial psychologist who wrote an influential study of salesmanship in 1961. It said the prime drivers of salesmen are greed, hostility and immaturity.
Like McMurry, the author is a believer in the human skill of selling. He recounts how Seddik Belyamani, the Moroccan-born former head of airline sales for Boeing, nicknamed “the $30 billion man,” once woke up the firm’s chief executive, Alan Mulally, in the dead of night to impress a customer who was backing off a purchase.
The McKinsey consultants’ book offers good advice about tightening up the selling science, but as Delves Broughton likes to point out, today the field is dominated not by the likes of McKinsey, but rather by selling gurus such as Jeffrey Gitomer.
Being a salesman in the internet age is getting harder. Sales forces are being cut and replaced with technology, and the job is losing its appeal. The popularity of the title “sales associate” on LinkedIn, an online network, has fallen dramatically in the past four years.
BMW’s boss in America, Ludwig Willisch, admitted to the authors of the McKinsey book that it is hard to persuade people to go into sales these days. As Frank Pacetta, a former Xerox salesman described by Delves Broughton, said, “when you’re in sales, it’s lonely, and it’s a war.”
Copyright © 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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