Understanding the Sales Force

This weekend we visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown NY and I was struck by a few things:

1) Why don’t we have a Hall of Fame for Salespeople? I know that companies provide awards for their own salespeople but is that limited recognition enough for those who are motivated most by recognition?

Your salespeople want a better, easier, simpler way to succeed. Yet as much as they want it, they very much want to hold on to what they know, the routine, approach, beliefs, strategies and tactics they’ve always used. Their security blanket.

Guy Kawasaki is at it again. This time he is behind Alltop, a magazine rack that points us to the best reading on the internet.  This week, sales.alltop.com debuted, pointing us to the best sales blogs on the web.  To make it even more interesting, to get people more engaged and undoubtedly to generate some buzz, they are running a contest. 

This afternoon, Chris Mott and I were discussing Obama and McCain. Since I don’t like either candidate, I feel somewhat protected and free to provide my political sales correlation. I’ve never dared to venture into a political editorial and I don’t mean for this to be one either. Please read the following thoughts as they would apply to competing salespeople fighting for the same big account.

Wouldn’t it be cool if your sales force got easy sales the way amateur golfers get easy pars at Charity run best ball golf tournaments? 

I’ve seen plenty of salespeople who sell smart without maximum effort and they get mediocre results. I’ve seen plenty of salespeople who put forth the maximum effort without selling smart and still perform quite well. So the clear advantage goes to the salesperson who puts forth maximum effort supported by maximum smart.

When companies attempt to improve sales they often look first to sales skills. If you’ve been reading this Blog for a while, you know that I believe skills are important, but only to a certain degree.  The problem with putting an emphasis on developing only the skills is that without the proper combination of strengths and incentive to support the use of those skills, the skills alone don’t get it done.

A large well-known technology company has a group of sales engineers that were recently evaluated.  When we ran the analysis on the data, it was clear that most of the 60 sales engineers preferred to be on the engineering side and not the sales side.  They lack the desire to be successful salespeople, they don’t enjoy selling, they aren’t money motivated and they aren’t committed.  So before we can even worry about what they have or don’t have in the way of selling skills, these findings tell us that they can’t be developed, have no incentive to change and shouldn’t be in sales.

I suspect that most parents with young kids have kitchen tables with wooden tops, not the glass tabletop that we have. Our six-year old son and his friends manage to get more of a mess on the underside of the tabletop than on the top side.  So, if the parents with wooden tabletops don’t see the mess, does that mean it isn’t there?