Salespeople are dead; long live Salespeople! (part 1)
Don’t you love a provocative headline? How to get your attention otherwise…
I have been in a direct sales role for the past decade. So writing an article with such a title can look like sawing off the branch I am sitting on. But let's face reality: no one likes salespeople. Not true? Right. Look at the word cloud published by Daniel Pink in his book To Sell is Human (see below). It represents what came to people's minds when asked about Salespeople.
Hard to detect any trace of love here. Try to find another job that generates as much antipathy. Difficult, isn't it? Back to our subject. Are Salespeople going to disappear? Would not the world be a better place without them? Thanks to technology, the answer is yes; their days are counted. At least under the "format", we know them today. Because there is a catch. Several actually. And we are going to discuss a few of them right now.
Bad news: we are all salespeople
“The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, you are a salesman, and you don’t know that.” That is what Arthur Miller wrote in his book Death of a Salesman in 1949. Provocative or simple reality? Well, if you know what “non-sales selling” is, you would most probably agree with him. Daniel Pink defines “non-sales selling" as the fact that we are continuous, be it with our family, friends, or colleagues, in the action of "persuading, convincing, and influencing others to give up something they've got in exchange for what we've got." And it does not have to be monetary. When I succeed in convincing my four kids to go to bed, my reward is priceless but not monetary: it is called quietness. Take social media and our dear Influencers. Are they not selling us something – whatever they have in whatever shape – in exchange for our time and attention?
"Everybody lives by selling something." Robert Louis Stevenson
In our life, we are all salespeople. It is a fact. And that is OK. You don't need a cure since it is not a disease. But it does not stop us from having such bad feelings about them. In the end, as much as we are all salespeople, we are also all Customers.
Interestingly within certain organizations, men can find people or departments with mixed feelings about their own sales team. Obviously, man should differentiate the feeling toward a specific individual and toward the function. But this is where it starts to be wicked since, in every organization, everyone should help selling.
Selling is not restricted to a specific group of individuals: it is a collective effort. But only a particular group of individuals within the organization has a commission-based salary scheme. True. Those commissions are paid against given and achieved targets. The same targets against which the performances of those individuals would be measured, monthly or quarterly, and their fate depends. It is the modern version of the sword of Damocles. Usually, those individuals are called salespeople. Or something similar. The table below gives a list of names used to describe them.
Their title can vary depending on several criteria, such as the job function, the type of stakeholders they deal with, the industry, the part of the world they are in, and of course, the product's position in the adoption cycle... About the latter, if the product or service is at the early stage of the Technology adoption life cycle, meaning Customers are mostly Innovators and Early adopters, there would be much more consultancy selling involved. And it might reflect in the title. Different customers, different skill sets, different names. Makes sense.
For the rest please see part 2.