Understanding the Sales Force

CRM should be a no-brainer. That is, it should be highly evident, to even the most doubting of all Thomases, that being able to display the following information is not only helpful, but necessary.

It’s not unusual for weak salespeople to generate business by marketing themselves. One of the many methods available is to drop brochures – with secretaries, on car windshields, at the bottom of driveways, via fax or email (not SPAM), attached to door knobs, but never in mailboxes unless you mailed them.

In a recent post, I blogged about my problem’s with Seth Godin’s article, Death of the Sales Call. Yesterday, a friend mentioned that he viewed a presentation about the Death of the Sales Force. It appeared to be based on an article originally posted in the spring of 2006 by Dr. David McMahon on the Graziadio Business Report. As the saying goes, the reports of this death are premature and greatly exaggerated.

Last week, Marketing Guru Seth Godin wrote about the ‘Death of the Sales Call’, a post I addressed here. Today he wrote about the ‘9 Things Marketing People Ought to Know About Salespeople’. Funny thing is, in point #9, he defends salespeople against marketing’s attempt to replace them with the web by saying that the game changing sales…is real people interacting with real people. Quite a change in his tune in just one week!

When I shared this with Jeff, he told me how consistent that is with his statistics about bell curves in general. He told me that in most cases, bell curves do not reflect reality. Wow, our statistics line up with Angus’ Law of Distribution!