توضیحات جورج

BEC : Sales -George

Okay, George here with a commentary about sales. As we mentioned when we were talking about marketing, the sales organization will generally be under the management of the marketing organization or the marketing director, marketing vice president, whatever their actual title is. The sales force, meaning all of the salespeople, they’re the ones within the marketing organization that have the job to actually be face to face with the customer and, as we said in the vocabulary, close the deal. Close the order, get the signature on the contract, get the check, whatever it is to actually sell the product.

Now, it’s interesting, if you go back in time and look at the history or the trend as to how salespeople or the different ways of selling have evolved. You can go back not too many years, probably before you can even remember, before the days of Internet and before the days of cell phones, there was a lot of what we call door-to-door selling. By door-todoor what I mean is a salesperson actually going from one company to another company to another company, many times unannounced, trying to get to talk to somebody of authority to sell their product.

Now, the good ones, of course, would make phone calls and try to set up appointments, but I go back to my early days in IBM. I started out in the division that made typewriters so a lot of our sales were done to small businesses, very small businesses, lawyers, doctors, small businesses that had a clerk or a bookkeeper in the back room that needed a typewriter. I hope you know what a typewriter is. That was before Internet.

That’s word processing when it had actually paper and the typed word.

That was the only way it could be done, door to door. I even remember a lot of different salespeople coming to the house, door to door. They’d go up and down the street. Quite often they were selling things for the house, brooms or vacuum cleaners, things of that nature, or they might be selling cleaning supplies, perfume, lipstick, shaving supplies, certainly things that you could get in a store somewhere, but their task as salespeople was to go door to door to door selling.

Well this evolved, particularly with the large companies, into specialized sales representatives. These are the ones who usually worked for a company that had several products. So companies decided well, let’s specialize and we will have sales representatives that will only sell one or two products. Then we’ll have another salesperson who will sell the rest of the products.

For example, I’ll take you back to the IBM days. We had typewriters, we had word processing equipment and we had dictation equipment. Well, the specialized sales group would have been, possibly, one person sold nothing but typewriters. The other one probably sold word processing equipment and dictation equipment, since they were kind of linked together. So that became the specialized representatives.

Now, the downfall of that particular process was that customers got tired of dealing at different times with different salespeople. Why do I have to talk to this guy about typewriters and this other person about word processing equipment? So what kind of evolved from that were team sales. This is where, basically, these two individuals who were the specialists teamed up and they would make a single call on the customer and they would talk about both products.

Now, that was kind of the beginnings of what we see today of this business of understanding the customer’s needs, helping them determine how to solve their problems, solutions to their day-to-day management issues and the range of products that were there with specialists, which could be as many as three or four in some companies, to come up with solutions. When I say three or four, I mean we’re talking about a hardware salesperson, a software salesperson and maybe even a management or organizational-type salesperson that helps in that process or sells a service to do that. That’s pretty prevalent in today’s environment.

Then along came the telephone and the use of the telephone as a sales tool. This is what they call telemarketing. These are the ones that drive me crazy because they’re people that call up all the time wanting to sell you something. That still exists, unfortunately. In the United States there’s been a lot of ways to prevent that because you can actually go to your phone company now and be put on a ‘Do Not Call’ list, which means telemarketers cannot call you, a list which obviously I am on. So, that one is not nearly as effective.

And, of course, where are we today? We’re with Internet sales, a whole different way of selling because you don’t see a person face to face, not very often, and quite often you don’t even talk to them on the phone. Now, the good companies you do. You’ll get a follow-up call, a follow-up sales call maybe. Certainly after they’ve sold you something, you bought something you’ll get a follow-up call thanking you and providing some more services, offering more services to you. So that’s a whole different way of selling and, as you can see, it’s changed a lot in the last several years.

You know there’s another thought I want to give you too. This is one probably from big corporations, but I think it pertains all the way through no matter what business you work in and that’s the thought that everyone in the company is a salesperson. Now, I’m not saying that everyone is a company actively goes face to face with a customer and sells something, but the thought here from many companies is every person, the image, the supportiveness of the company and how positive they are about the company makes that person a salesperson. A lot of big corporations are very enthusiastic with their employees about that subject, so much so that if employees attract negative attention to the company they’re quite likely fired.

So every person in a company is a salesperson. The image you project, the attitudes that you have, the positiveness and supportive nature of your company that is sales.

You are selling people. You’re improving the brand. You’re making the brand something people want to deal with and that’s a good thing. I think that’s a very good approach.

We said that salespeople, I say, are very unique. They have a set of skills and abilities that’s a little different. Generally, a salesperson is very confident. Hopefully, they’re confident about their product, but they’ll be very confident about themselves. They are always very persuasive and persistent type of people. You have to be to overcome objections and rejections.

Another point, they handle rejection and objection quite easily. It doesn’t get into their brain and upset them and the good ones seem to be motivated by money. Now, I would submit to you that money is not the true motivator. It’s what they want to buy with it, but they are motivated to make a lot of money for whatever purpose it is that they use their money; very highly-motivated people.

The skills they use or skills that are very helpful not only in their job just happen to be some of the skills that are very helpful in a management position. Their ability to demonstrate features and benefits, for example, over the competition or what exists, that’s a skill that managers also have to have --to demonstrate features and benefits to their people.

Salespeople have to have the ability to show customers or clients the benefit of their product. Salespeople have to create an emotional desire for a customer to own something, to buy something, to sign the contract, to turn over the money. Salespeople are very good at applying emotional pressure, silent, unnoticed emotional pressure to buy the product, to close the order and, bottom line, are very good at getting the order.

Well, all of these things happen to be rather useful skills in management, as you’ll see when we talk about the skills that managers should have.

So, I would say think of yourself no matter what your job is as a salesperson, because your attitude, your image, not only on the job but outside is a reflection of the company that you work for. If you are negative about your job or negative about your company guess what? A lot of people are not going to try to buy anything or they’re not going to want to deal with your company. That’s not a good thing because your company is the one that pays you wages to work there so try to be positive. If you can’t then maybe you move on, but important factor. Everybody is a salesperson, everybody in the company.

So there you have it, my thoughts on salespeople and the operation, the organization and how it works.

Until next time, this is George.

The End.