What’s the best approach to managing sales reps?

Is it monitor activity? There are lots of guys who do that – the 100 calls each week type task masters.

Is it micro management? – go there, say this, ask that, give this presentation, close, discount, plead, threaten. There are more than a few who’ll work that way too.

Then there’s the Analytocrats – bureaucratic types who know all the data, but not what it means.

There’s also the Patriarchs – father figures who’ll carry the can.

And the Teflon guys, who spend all their time making sure somebody else gets the blame.

What do you think? Which management strategy works best?

We think the answer is None of the Above.

The best approach to managing sales reps is not to bother. Manage their prospect lists instead. That’s the grown up approach to managing grown up, professional sales staff. Treat them like business people who get paid for adding value, not making calls or corporate presentations.

Maybe, you don’t think this makes sense? After all, the traditional sales funnel starts with calls, right? Sales is a numbers game, isn’t it? More calls equals more prospects equals more sales. It’s always been that way. !00 calls gets you 20 first meetings gets you 5 proposals, two presentations, and one sale. Or something like that.

Perhaps. But not anymore. It used to be that way, in the Industrial Age.

The Information Revolution is changing all that, and fast. In the 21st Century, customers are better informed, more demanding, and have more choices. Successful sales propositions are tailored to meet their specific aspirations, not cookie cutter pitches.

In this type of market there is no one profile for the successful sales rep. Good ones come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with different personalities. They’re every bit as individual as the customers they sell too. And every deal is unique too. Each sale is a three dimensional puzzle. The difference between successful reps and the rest is their ability to navigate a way through that puzzle, emerging with an order for the right product, at the right price, and making the customer happy in the process.

Everything else is window dressing, at best, and irrelevant nuisance, at worst.

What really counts is the prospect list.

That’s the sharp end of the business. The start of the revenue generation process, which ultimately pays the wages, bonuses, and shareholder profits.

The prospect list is where the enlightened sales manager monitors both ends of his operation – what the sales guys do at one end, and how much revenue gets produced at the other. If the rep’s deal doesn’t qualify for the list, she has to go find another one. If the sales plan isn’t working out, it gets revised with new strategy and actions. If the sale is progressing as it should, the rep is rewarded with a higher probability percentage, and greater sales forecast as a result. Reps with high quality and high value sales forecasts enjoy more freedom, are accorded more respect and support, and more opportunities.

Every sales rep wants to have a big prospect list. It means credibility, and security, and status. Left to their own devices they’ll cram every conceivable deal onto it. That’s the cause of the Hockey Stick problem.

The sales manager can’t control everything sales reps do. They spend most of their time unsupervised. It has to be that way. It’s the nature of the job.

But the sales manager can control what’s on the prospect list, and what weighted value it gets. Scrubbing low probability deals off, and increasing the value of higher probability deals, is the simplest, most effective approach to influencing sales rep behaviour.

It doesn’t make many friends, but it does make sales people focus on results.  Sales people soon learn. Faced with the sales manager review, they’ll work harder at doing the right things and stop doing the wrong things.

There’s a double win here.

Driving sales rep behaviour, by attaching value to their inputs, takes care of one end of the revenue generation process. They make a better job of what they’re supposed to do.

Happily, it simultaneously, and automatically, drives the other end of the process. More forecast deals result in sales, and fewer are lost.

Sales managers who really understand sales people control their prospect lists, not the number of calls they make, or what they say to customers.

Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets? Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.

Related articles

• Sales Management Needs To Be More About Planning and Less About Activity
• The Sales Manager Review Process Explained
• Is Failing to Plan a Sale Planning to Lose a Sale
• Lifting Your Sales Management Game

How does any small business owner set about recruiting a sales manager?

Recruiting anybody is a risk. No matter how carefully candidates are interviewed and references checked, there’s always the question of whether there’ll be a clash of cultures.

It’s doubly difficult with sales people. They spend a lot of time on their own with the business’ most precious resource – the customers. They can do a lot of damage, before anybody knows about it.

It’s even worse with sales managers.  In any small business the sales manager is a top dog, not necessarily the boss of course, but certainly in a position to cause real problems.  And sales managers are the kind of people who won’t shrink from confrontation. They need to be opinionated, straight talking, and demanding. That personality is almost a prerequisite for success in the job.

Choosing somebody who will add value without risking the delicate balance of relationships is vital. But its hard to test that before the job is offered.

On the other side of the coin, its hard to get successful sales managers to consider a position with a small company. Leaving a secure position in a big business, with the support structure and compensation usually provided by such organisations isn’t attractive.

That means most candidates applying for the job aren’t successful sales managers.  They might be inexperienced. They might be ineffective. They might be downright disasters.

The business owner, in order to get the right person, will need to sell the job as well as test the applicants. That’s going to take an exciting vision backed up with a pragmatic understanding of what it takes to build and run a sales operation.

Our article How To Hire A Sales Manager offers some solid advice on how to look for, attract, and select the best person available.  It suggests places to look, risks to be careful of, questions to ask, and answers to look for.

It can be equally interesting for anybody wanting to get a sales management job with a small business, as will the articles you’ll find here in our Sales Manager category. There’s lots of comment about the challenges of the job and advice on how to overcome them.

Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets? Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.

Sales Management seems to be a hot topic these days. Our blog at Successful Sales Management is attracting a lot of interest from people wanting to understand more about it. Or at least, somebody else’s thoughts on the subject.

Readers registering for our email newsletter are asked what their role is in business. The one quoted most often is, unsurprisingly, sales manager, but its closely followed by sales executive, and business owner.

The business owner category is interesting. Invariably these are hard working entrepreneurs building a business. They’ll be specialists in what their business does – business services, manufacturing, real estate, financial services – but almost certainly not generic sales and sales management. They’ll need an effective sales operation, but be having difficulty with typical sales speak, and sales culture.

The world of punters, cold calls, sales funnels, activity rates, sales forecasting, heavy hitting closers, and 800lb gorillas, doesn’t make sense to people who do a proper job for a living. Those are the basic folklore of sales people. Concepts which exclude normal Joes from the conversation, and hide the stuff nobody wants to admit.

Typical sales, and sales management, philosophies, processes and tools don’t work too well anymore.

So much is obvious to business owners. They’re the ones struggling to keep the company afloat, while the sales guys seem intent on spending all the money chasing deals which never come in.

Surely, it can’t be that difficult. Selling is just business, after all. Why can’t sales managers find ways to make things work better, the way design, and production, and distribution, and accounting managers do?

That’s why business owners are out there looking for insight. They’re looking for ways to get sales doing a better job.

It’s a subject close to our heart, and one we’ve written about, a lot, with articles like these:

How Sales Strategy Could Fix the Economy

Of course the problem right now is the economy. Selling, even with a great strategy, is tough. Both sides of the Atlantic, and even in Asia, the developed economies are stuck. Maybe applying our sales strategy logic can help find a way of unsticking them?

Sales Management for the 21st Century

Whereas markets used to be local, and products expensive, and hard to get hold of, they are now global, and awash with competition. Customers used to be desperate to get hold of the new manufactured goods. They’d happily waited for delivery, tolerated products which didn’t really do what it said on the tin. They suffered poor customer service in silence, and paid outrageous prices for it.

Management’s Role in Everything

Like virtually everything we know about how business works, the concept of management evolved during the Industrial Revolution as the owner’s command and control structure. The boss told the manager, and the manager told the supervisor, and the supervisor told the guy making the machine go up and down. That gave the manager lots of status, and not much responsibility.

Sales Managers Need to Focus More on Management and Less On Sales

That isn’t going to happen until sales managers spend less time selling, and more time managing – more time managing not only sales operations but also support services like marketing and customer service, and the accountants, and perhaps most importantly the bosses.

Sales Management Needs To Be More About Planning And Less About Activity

Far better to spend some time upfront, figuring out what ABCD Inc will buy, why they’ll buy it, how they’ll buy it and when they’ll buy it. Then we’ll know if there’s a realistic chance of some business, what we’ll need in our proposition, how we’ll resource the sale, and when to walk away if the deal isn’t going to happen.

Is Failing to Plan a Sale Planning to Fail

The sales manager with a plan is much better placed to help the team.Review meetings are targeted on what needs to be done, and weighted probability forecasts are more accurate when milestones show how the sale is progressing.

Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets? Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.

Sales management is all about getting prospects to buy what your company is selling, right? You’ve got the product, maybe with a few limitations. You’ve got the marketing, at least somebody’s idea of what’s needed to excite customers, even if it isn’t yours. You’ve got the troops, although most won’t be the best in your industry. All you have to do is drive the activity. Get the guys making more calls, presenting more positively, closing more confidently.

If only life in the sales funnel was that simple! Of course it isn’t.

There was time when managing sales was exactly like that. It was a time when products were in short supply, prices were high, customers were desperate to get their hands on new stuff, and not too demanding of quality and service, and sales people knew a lot more than prospects about their markets.

Those were the days of the Industrial Revolution, before the Information Revolution changed everything, forever.

Life in the sales funnel is very different in the 21st Century. Instead of customers looking for things to do with their money, buyers are now looking for money to do things. The Internet gives your prospects more information about your markets than your sales people. Probably knowledge and insight you’d prefer them not to have. The white hot competition, enabled by globalisation and driven by innovation, drives customer demands up, and prices and margins down.

This isn’t the ideal backdrop for business as usual. In fact, sales managers need to drive their teams harder, and harder, just to stand still.

So what hope is there? Are sales professionals headed the way of the dinosaurs? Most likely not. But their survival will depend on recognition of the new paradigm, and reengineering ways they do business.

Getting people to buy what the business is selling no longer works. Getting the bosses to sell what people are buying is the new business as normal. And that’s where sales managers need to look for opportunities to lift their game.

When sales managers act more like managers than sales guys, they look for ways to improve the performance of their teams – not do more of the same things, but do different things.

The sales model needs to be turned on its head.

• Sales people need to stop telling customers, and start asking instead.
• Managers need to monitor what’s happening on the ground so they translate market dynamics into new strategies.
• They need to measure what works, and what doesn’t, and translate failures into opportunities for process improvements.
• They need to choose clear blue water, and establish a unique value proposition in it, to stand out from the crowd.

They need to reengineer the way they think, from driving activity to Plan Act Review.

Visionaries, evangelists, strategists, process engineers, quality controllers, leaders, coaches – all descriptions not normally associated with managing sales, but new dimensions in which today’s sales managers can help their organisations reengineer what they do for customers.

Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets? Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.

Regular visitors to our blogs will know sales strategy features strongly in our thinking, and especially as a fundamental component of Reengineering Sales Management. Our book explains in detail the why’s and hows of sales strategy, and even includes a template to get readers started on developing their own, to fit their business, in their own markets.

But making sense of concepts can be tough, without the context of a particular business and its opportunities and challenges. That context is most easily set with real life examples.

Case studies can be ideal for explaining real life situations, showing how the concept is applied, and the value to come out of what can seem an academic exercise.

That’s why we’ve posted two case studies in our Successful Sales Management blog. These tell the stories of two opportunities we’ve been working on, for other parts of our business. They’ll make interesting reading for anybody who prefers concrete examples to esoteric theories.

Developing a Sales Strategy for a Bikes Business is a summary of our work in progress, figuring out how we can build on our personal interests in cycling to make an engaging and successful lifestyle business.

At precisely the time when cycling has transformed from merely a cheap mode of transport to a lifestyle, the services which actually enable that lifestyle have disappeared. Cycling only gets to be healthy friendly fun with the right bike and equipment, properly fitted and maintained, and as part of a community. Anybody buying a bike, based on the marketing and from a discount retailer, is making a mistake. Without the insight and support of an expert, that cheap bike will be awfully expensive when it stays in the garage, because riding it just isn’t fun, or it doesn’t work properly, or both.

Developing A Sales Strategy for a Medical Device explains how working on the detail of our sales strategy persuaded us to walk away from this particular opportunity.

We’re sales guys, not doctors. We aren’t experts in medical devices, and we have no specific knowledge of neurological diseases and treatments. Everything we discovered came from researching the internet, and talking to experts wherever we could. Once we developed the full picture, we shared it with consortium colleagues and asked them to correct any errors. They didn’t. You’ll understand why we decided to walk away from this opportunity, and save our money for more interesting ideas.

Follow the individual links to the original articles for the full stories and maybe spend some more time with our other articles about sales strategy.

Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets? Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.

With our economies stuck in the doldrums, economists always getting it wrong, and politicians not knowing what to do, somebody needs to bring new ideas to the conversation.  To me, that sounds like a job for a sales manager.

OK, that might sound like a bit of a stretch.  Sales managers are great people.  They work hard, against all the odds, accepting responsibility for the whole deal working, when others, in better positions, refuse to address the issues.

But are they really equipped to solve problems politicians and central bankers can’t?

Maybe they are.  Maybe applying some of the thinking they use to develop sales strategy could be useful in unblocking the system.  After all, that’s what they do, as business as usual.

When customers aren’t sure.  When sales people won’t listen.  When CEOs won’t make Marketing, and Manufacturing, face facts the market proves to be issues.

The sales manager finds a way.

How does that relate to fixing the economy?

For our counter intuitive perspective check out How Sales Strategy Could Fix The Economy

Make companies pay employees more, so they buy stuff, to replace and recycle the junk they bought before, with innovation which improves health and happiness.

You might think the article is about politics, but it isn’t.  It’s simply about resetting the market. It’s about recognising the last game is over, been won. Now its time to deal new hands of cards, and start over.

Does opportunity cost figure in your sales management strategy?

When choosing sales models, coaching reps, or even deciding on tactics for a particular deal, do you consider what the cost of your decisions might be? Not the actual costs, but the alternative cost – the value which could be achieved with alternative decisions. If you were to do that, rather than this, how much more, or less, value would you create? And how does that influence the choices you make?

Probably not.

The concept is one of those ideas dreamt up by economists. Given their track record in guiding our economies through the recent storms, the real world sales manager could be forgiven for dismissing anything they suggest about how to make business work better. Economists are primarily academics, and rarely understand people who have to make things happen, to earn a living. They can afford theories, whereas business people have to get results, regardless of whatever that takes.

And anyway, the concept contradicts principles sales managers have followed ever since factories made stuff which needed selling.

The traditional model for sales management assumes sales peoples time is cheap, and profit from any sale is substantial. Opportunity cost looks at that formula from the other direction, where sales peoples time is expensive, and profits from sales are low.

In which case, this academic theory might make for an interesting discussion, but has little relevance to territories, activity rates, and sales skills. Those are the factors which make for successful sales operations. Aren’t they.

Where the selling effort is expensive, as in sales people backed up by Marketing, Technical Support and Customer Service, the opportunity cost is fundamental, not just to sales operations, but to the very success of the business.

This is why Reengineering Sales Management focuses so hard on strategy, and process, including qualification. It’s all about spending less time on deals which won’t come in, and spending more time on those which will, given enough attention and effort. The opportunity cost of chasing a sales deal which is ultimately lost is the value of the deal which would have been won, had that been worked on instead.

The Opportunity Cost In Any Sale gives simple examples of how this works.

With the way traditional models work using sales funnels, the opportunity cost seems meaningless. When the sales team pitches 10 contacts with its proposition, knowing 3 will ask for a proposal, and of those 1 will buy, the actual cost of pitching the 9 who don’t buy is simply a cost of doing business. We can easily understand the total cost of sale for the successful deal is the cost of trying to sell all 10. Where each cost of sale is $1 and the profit on a successful sale is $100, who cares about the cost?

It’s a different story when the cost of trying to sell each deal is $10, of course. Thats the way most deals turn out these days, now customers are sophisticated, informed and demanding. In that case, the total sales cost wipes out all the margin on the one successful sale. But when we consider the opportunity cost, this approach looks to be really bad business.

Just looking at the actual cost, the funnel pitching 10 at a cost of $10 each in order to make a single sale worth $100 appears to be break even. Reduce the cost of each sale by $1, or increase the value of the successful sale by $10, and the business model starts to make sense. Not much sense, but at least its profitable.

But with opportunity cost its a very different story. Assuming a failed sale costs the same as a successful sale, and each successful sale is worth $100, the opportunity cost of operating the sales funnel model is $900 – value which would have been achieved had different choices been made.

In which case the sales funnel model is obviously crazy.

If, instead of the sales team working on a deal which ultimately fails, it would work on one which succeeds, the total value of all the deals is $1,000.

The sales manager who builds a strategy, and selects an operating model, which stops her guys selling to people who aren’t going to buy, wastes a lot less of her resources than the one who does it the old fashioned way. Meanwhile, the same sales manager also makes her resources very much more effective, increasing profitability and harvesting a host of other benefits.

That’s what management is about, isn’t it? And its why every sales manager, and sales professional for that matter, should understand what the economists describe as opportunity cost.

Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets? Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.

Is your sales management performance disappointing? Are you able to make reliable sales forecasts, knowing which deals you’re going to win? Is your funnel or pipeline management more aspiration than expectation?  Are you managing sales, or are sales managing you? Maybe its time to reengineer your sales management?

What do we mean by reengineer?  Revise your sales strategy, implement new sales management and sales processes and integrate sales forecasting,

That does sound like quite a job, especially when its on top of doing the day job – actually keeping the wheels turning and the revenue coming in.  But it needn’t be a problem.

You can jump start your reengineer project with our templates, checklists, examples, and ideas on how to make them fit your unique business.  These sales management tools will help you redefine your business plan, sales strategy, sales management philosophy and systems, sales processes, and sales forecasts.  Our insight will help you evolve your sales operations to a new level of predictable performance, without risking the business along the way.

Download our eBook Rengineering Sales Management today, and get to work, making sure your strategies and systems are doing the best possible job for you.

What is the typical sales model, and why does it need to change and to what?

Most people won’t know too much about the history of selling, and that includes a lot of sales people. Why would they bother to find out? Everybody knows selling is simple, right? Find a prospect, pitch the benefits and the price, ask for the order, and when that doesn’t work, do it again. That’s the typical sales model.

Well, that is the way most sales people think of their job, and its certainly the way the beancounters they work for think it happens. Sales people who aren’t successful fail because they don’t have what it takes, or don’t work hard enough. That’s the accepted wisdom about selling, and it hasn’t evolved since the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

But this is wrong, and getting more wrong everyday as customers get smarter and better informed.

Building a product and sending out sales people to knock on doors, without a detailed understanding of customer influences used to work, but doesn’t anymore.

We’ve recently been involved in a business development project which offers an ideal case study. It shows how those who don’t really understand sales can cause themselves, and others, a lot of heartache when assuming they do.

This was a research and development project, funded by the government, and resourced by some of the top research organisations – scientists and engineers. More than £1 million investment by the public purse in developing a technology which doesn’t exist elsewhere sounds pretty exciting. Even more so, when the target is a medical device for use with neurological diseases. This has to be a very big market – global – with plenty of money.

The project was the brainchild of a young, hotshot engineer, newly equipped with his PHd in biomechanics. Apparently he’d found a way of diagnosing a neurological disease by analysing handwriting. The product would be a hardware device, attached to a computer, with software to analyse the handwriting of those thought to be suffering from the disease. Every neurologist would want one. There are 40,000 in Europe and many, many more in the rest of the developed world. A unit price of £5000, plus ongoing maintenance fees, made a very attractive business plan. The project proposal included a plan for turning the investment in research into a commercial success for the SMEs involved in the consortium.

The marketing, sales and distribution – sales operations – would be simple. Once the device had completed clinical trials a sales team would take over and sell the product and services direct to neurologists in hospitals. Target customers would be easy to find – every large hospital has a Neurology department. The sales pitch would be simple – this is a unique device and will help you achieve a more accurate diagnosis for patients. All the sales team would need to do would be make appointments, explain the benefits, and ask for the order.

Simple. Who wouldn’t want a piece of this particular opportunity?

Well, actually we didn’t. Much to the displeasure of the hotshot. His entire business concept was under threat when we decided his plan wasn’t going to work. He’d rather continue fooling himself, and his business partners, than recognise the limitations of his plan. He didn’t agree with us, of course. He knew how to sell the new product and wouldn’t be needing our help anyway.

Why didn’t we want anything to do with it?

We did, in the beginning.

It all sounded very exciting, until we started to develop the sales strategy. Who would pay how much for this product and why? That’s when it got complicated.

No amount of marketing, no number of cold calls, no quantity of sales presentations, would ever get this product sold, at any price. Calling on neurologists, showing them this shiny new toy and asking for the order would be a disaster.

Why, you may well ask?

Clinicians in hospitals don’t buy stuff. They’ll obviously decide what they want, but have to ask the administrators to buy it for them. Those administrators want to know what’s the business case. What will the neurologist do differently, enabled by the new tool? How much will it save? How much will it improve patient care? How does this requirement compare with all the other spend requests from all the other clinicians, in terms of cost benefit?

It turns out nothing about the patient care will change. There will be no savings, and no improvements in healthcare provided. And no administrator is going to spend on that.

Even worse. Even though there’s no business case for this product, there is a whole slew of competition, from new ideas in development. These are closer to market ready, provided by highly credible organisations with established reputations in the sector, and available to the user at zero cost, or close to it.

The hotshot engineer thinks he knows all about selling – like a lot of people who really understand very little about the noble art. But he’s going to find out how not to do it, the hard way – knocking on doors, showing people his product, explaining the features and benefits, and asking for the order.

Because he’ll be selling the wrong product to the wrong people with wrong ideas about why they should buy it.

Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets?  Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.

Selling the Old Fashioned Way is an attractive philosophy. Somehow, there’s an implication of complexity in the ways we do things these days which is unnecessary. The management gurus and consultants have managed to turn a simple idea like business into a pseudo science. Simply buying and selling and making a turn on the deal is far too easy to understand. Now everything we talk about is management of resources and processes, and continuous improvement.

Sales professionals don’t typically enjoy complexity. They live in the real world of cold call prospecting, pitching and closing, targets and commissions – all of the time fighting internal bureaucrats, smart Alec customers, and competitors with better products, at cheaper prices. No wonder keeping things simple and selling the old fashioned way are popular concepts.

Unfortunately, the world has moved on, and the old fashioned ways don’t work so well in today’s customer driven markets. Understanding quite why, and how sales professionals need to change, to what, is made a lot easier if we revisit the traditional sales and sales management model, and compare it with the world as it exists today.

By traditional model, we’re referring to the most basic skeleton on which the majority of sales functions have built their own version. Like other models for business, it emerged early in the industrial revolution, when markets for everything were infinite, and supply of anything was short.  Increasingly wealthy people were transforming into consumers, and even richer people built factories to supply them with products they wanted. The factory owners needed somebody to tell potential buyers what was available, at what price, and bring back sales orders for the factory to fill. The traveling salesman emerged.

Our, by now, generic salesman figured out the best way for him to do his job. He developed a model (although certainly didn’t call it that at the time), which went something like this:

• Find somebody who would listen to his presentation.
• Show them the product and tell them the price.
• Ask for an order.
• Reduce the price till that person agreed to buy.
• Find somebody else and repeat the process.

That’s when sales people started Kissing Frogs!
(The Kissing Frogs analogy comes from the fairy tale in which a Princess kissed a frog, which then turned into a handsome Prince. Most frogs don’t turn into Princes when kissed – hence the accepted theology You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs to Find a Prince, and the sales persons You Have to Pitch a Lot of People to Find a Customer).

As businesses grew and made more products for sale, the owners needed more people selling, and others to manage them.  The generic sales manager evolved. Invariably he (and it was exclusively hes at the time) was one of the more successful sales people.  He’d worked harder than the others, found more people to listen, made more exciting pitches, closed more deals. Quite naturally he was best placed to recruit, train and manage new guys to do the same job.

The sales manager naturally based his efforts on the Kissing Frogs theology – get out on the street, make more calls, pitch more prospects, close harder. His model was simple, easy to train, and manage.  He could even use it for planning, and measuring, and managing.  For example, he knew he could make 5 sales each day if he pitched 20 prospects. The business owner was making 100 products everyday, so the manager needed 20 sales people pitching 400 prospects each day to make the 100 sales.  That’s when the sales target emerged. Sales people who didn’t make the 5 sales per day were replaced by new ones. The guys who did received a bonus.  We got the Hero or Zero mentality.  Sales teams got territories, targets, commissions, over riders and Presidents Clubs. Sales managers got Activity Rates and big sticks they used to drive their sales teams.

Some reports suggest the first sales people were employed to sell bibles, door to door.  That would explain how they got the reputation for aggressive, pushy, intimidating behaviour, and how a whole industry of motivational mentors evolved. Have faith, convey your confidence to the prospect, don’t ask questions he can answer with No, Close Close Close.

The sales industry got it’s own super heroes. While the kids got Superman and Batman, we got the Heavy Hitting, Hard Closing, Won’t Take No For An Answer, 800lb Gorilla.  We got Punters (unsuspecting pilgrims ripe to be separated from their money), Elevator Pitches (fast talking sales presentations) and Sales Funnels. We got Cold Calls, Discounts, Specials, Corporate Presentations, Vendor Strategies, Marketing, Internet Marketing and SPAM.  And we got unhappy customers, by the boat load.

The bottom line in the story of the traditional sales model is it’s inefficient, expensive, and results in unhappy customers. And it’s both ripe for, and worthy of reengineering. But to what?

The Harvard Business Review tells us:.
“In the realm of selling, it’s the buyer who is newly empowered. Customers no longer need a salesperson to learn about a company’s offering, much less to place an order. As a result, sales has become more about helping customers define the problem they are trying to solve and assemble a complete solution. ”

We agree, but would add “without bankrupting the company in the process”. The new customer focused, consulting based, flexible, personalized sales approach will be horribly expensive if delivered in the traditional model, and won’t work under the traditional management philosopy and style.

In today’s world, sales people need to evolve from robotic drones into intelligent capable entrepreneurs – business people who can develop value adding and sharing relationships with customers.  Sales managers need to evolve from lion tamers into engineers, with resources, strategies and processes which can be continuously improved. The sales model needs to target the right prospects with a high probability of requirement, define a scope of delivery, ensure compatibility of buyer and seller processes, plan and execute a process through which both buyer and seller agree what will work for both parties, and how that will be achieved and paid for.

Instead of simply making product because they can, businesses need to offer value propositions the customers want, and which can be delivered. They need a sales strategy to decide which offers are put to which potential customers, and how. They need a sales process which minimizes the cost of sale, by not selling to those unlikely to buy. They need ‘business people’ sales guys who can collaborate, negotiate and manage. And they need to measure the results, and find ways to improve the efficiency of the process. They need a continuous cycle of improvement – just like the engineers in the factories.

Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets?  Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.