The Future of the Sales Profession

How to Survive the Big Cull and Become One of Your Industry's Most Sought-After B2B Sales Professionals

Graham Hawkins

• Publisher: Grammar Factory Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780995445307
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

B2B sales is harder than ever before.

Product lifecycles are getting shorter, sales cycles are getting longer, there are more competitors entering the market, and buyers are doing most of their research online before they even call you. When you finally get the meeting, buyers only want your best price.

Despite all of this, your manager keeps asking for more – more calls, more meetings, faster, faster, faster!

You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – a more challenging sales environment than ever before on one side, and ever-increasing quotas and expectations on the other.

How will you respond? Wait and see how it all unfolds? Or fight for your career and your livelihood?

In The Future of the Sales Profession, sales leader Graham Hawkins shares the cold, hard truths about the new realities facing the sales profession, and how you can protect and enhance your career.

PART 1

A BRIEF HISTORY
OF THE
SALES PROFESSION

CHAPTER 1

130 YEARS ON REPEAT

‘If you don’t know history, then you

don’t know anything. You are a leaf that

doesn’t know it is part of a tree.’

– Michael Crichton

MOST SALES PEOPLE don’t realise that the sales profession has undergone more change in the last five years than it has in the last 130.

But how can that be, when, over the past century or so, methodology after methodology, book after book, and training program after training program has been released, promising to revolutionise the sales landscape?

My mother is a history teacher, and she has always said that it’s impossible to know who you are today if you don’t understand where you have come from. For this reason, when I first began making judgements about where the sales profession was headed, I researched where we had come from and why our legacy approaches, attitudes and stereotypes exist today.

What I found was surprising. Putting aside some minor tweaks and variations, and some new terminologies and fads, sales people have performed the same fundamental role since the late 1800s.

Throughout the years, sales people have acted largely as autonomous agents who have been rewarded with commissions and bonuses. Their role was to push products into markets, and the value they delivered was sharing information that customers couldn’t access independently. Consequently, the sales person was seen as an expert in their field, and sales people who focused on addressing their customers’ needs and building relationships were able to position themselves as trusted advisers.

While a range of new methodologies emerged over the years, many of them didn’t offer anything new, as you’ll discover in this chapter. They sold systems and principles in a new package, but the fundamental structures and methods of the profession remained largely the same.

1800s: Rise of the snake oil salesman

When America established its western frontier in the 1800s, migrants lost access to many of the benefits of established cities in the east, including medicine, fashion and news. This led to the rise of the travelling salesman, with sales people travelling from town to town in horse-drawn wagons peddling a range of goods.⁷

There were no controls or regulations for these salesmen, leaving customers unprotected and the salesmen unpunished should their goods not deliver the promised results. This left peddlers free to make farfetched claims about the properties of their products in order to make more sales.

Unsurprisingly, this was the time of the ‘snake oil’ salesmen, or salesmen offering miraculous potions that would cure all manner of ailments – balding, pimples, in-grown toenails, aches and pains, and more.

To sell their potions, they would use elaborate sales pitches, including skits to entertain the audience, ‘lectures’ on the product itself, Quakers recruited as assistants to lend an air of moral respectability, and Native Americans recruited to validate the truth of the salesmen’s claims. They also planted ‘shills’ in the audience – people claiming to be satisfied customers who would support any claims.

The most well-known of the peddlers claiming to sell literal snake oil was Clark Stanley. After eleven years as a cowboy, Stanley maintained that he studied with a Moki Pueblo Indian medicine man who gave him the recipe for his Snake Oil Liniment. He then fashioned himself as ‘The Rattlesnake King’ and sold his liniment throughout the country in presentations that included killing rattlesnakes and squeezing their bodies for oil.

An advertisement in the 1890s described Stanley’s snake oil as ‘a wonderful pain-destroying compound’ and ‘the strongest and best liniment known for the cure of all pain and lameness.’ According to the campaign, the oil treated ‘rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, contracted muscles, toothache, sprains, swellings, etc.’ as well as ‘frost bites, chill blains, bruises, sore throat, [and] bites of animals, insects and reptiles.’⁸

However, federal testing in 1917 found that not only did Stanley’s ‘snake oil’ have no medicinal value, but it didn’t even contain snake oil, being made of mostly of mineral oil, with one per cent fatty oil, some red pepper, turpentine and camphor.⁹

Unsurprisingly, snake oils and the like damaged the reputation of sales people. They started to be seen as liars and exaggerators with little care for their customers,¹⁰ willing to push a product onto a customer whether they needed it or not. Unfortunately for us, this has contributed to the bad reputation that sales people still suffer from to this very day.

1880s: Birth of the modern sales force

The idea of a modern, coordinated sales force came about when James H Patterson formed the National Cash Register Company (NCR) with his brother in Dayton, Ohio, in 1884.

At the time, there was no market for cash registers, with fewer than 400 having ever been sold. Few retail businesses saw the value in a machine that was seen to perform a simple task in an overly complicated fashion, and some clerks feared that the machines could be used to spy on their integrity.

Additionally, the salesmen themselves were a problem. Salesmen in general were seen as having questionable reputations, especially among established business people, and the sales people already employed by NCR were disorganised, unprepared for sales presentations and uncommitted to the company and the product.

As a true believer in the cash register – having cut his own retail store debt from USD16,000 to USD3,000 in six months and showing a profit of USD5,000 – Patterson knew something needed to change.

This led to a process of trial and error where Patterson invested in advertising, publicity, and direct mail that was distributed to millions, featuring pictures of the cash registers and testimonials from satisfied customers. The result was that prospects who had been unaware of the product started to develop a need for it.

Yet, with his salesmen unable to convert interested prospects into paying customers, Patterson needed to turn his attention to NCR’s sales force. He visited sales offices in over fifty towns and cities in just fifty-one days and discovered that: ‘One-half of our salesmen are so ignorant of their product that they will actually prevent a man from buying, even though he wanted a cash register.’¹¹

On his return to Dayton, he gathered the sales presentations of NCR’s most successful salesmen, which his brother-in-law, Joseph H Crane, then used to create a document titled ‘How I Sell National Cash Registers’, known as the NCR Primer.

The Primer divided a sale into four steps:¹²

1.APPROACH: In the approach, the salesman did not mention the cash register. Instead, he explained that he wanted to help the businessman find ways to increase his profit.

1.PROPOSITION: The proposition was when the salesman first described the register, explaining how it would prevent theft and give an accurate account of the day’s receipts.

2.DEMONSTRATION: In this stage, the salesman would demonstrate the machine at the local NCR office, or at a nearby hotel where he had set up a display.

3.CLOSE: The Primer instructed salesmen not to ask for an order, but to take for granted that the customer would buy by asking questions like: ‘What colour should I make it?’ or ‘How soon do you want delivery?’ They were then instructed to fill out their order form with the customer’s details, and hand it to him to sign.

The Primer then shared methods for handling objections: ‘If he objects, find out why, answer his objections and again prepare him for signature … Make the merchant feel that he is buying because of his own good judgement … Find out the real reason why and your chances are that that is the very reason why he should buy … Concentrate your whole force on one good strong point, appeal to judgement, get him to acknowledge that what you say is true, then hand the pen to him in a matter-of-fact way and keep on with what you were saying. This makes signing the logical and obvious thing to do.’¹³

Patterson instructed that all salesmen learn the document by heart. When there was resistance, Patterson started testing salesmen – those who failed were fired, while those who had memorised the Primer saw their sales soar.

The Primer was soon followed by the Book of Arguments, which outlined common objections and how to counter them, which later developed into the NCR Manual, or a collection of every question a prospect might ask.

However, some salesmen still balked at the idea of learning these manuals by heart and, when he quizzed the NCR salesmen at the company display booths at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Patterson discovered that hardly any of them could answer simple questions about the product. He hauled them off to a hotel room for an impromptu training session and saw such an improvement that he decided to create training schools for his salesforce.

The training schools taught sales people skills in communication, understanding prospects and delivering a clear sales message, with the key learning being that they should think in terms of their prospect’s needs rather than in terms of the product. Sales people were taught how to modify sales presentations depending on the type of customer and the type of sales resistance shown, along with how to incorporate charts, graphs, drawings and o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Part 1: A Brief History of the Sales Profession
• Part 2: The New Realities of Sales
• Part 3: How You Can Thrive as a Sales Professional
• Conclusion: What Lies Ahead?
• Acknowledgements
• SalesTribe
• About the Author