Understanding the Sales Force

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!

The United Professional Sales Association (UPSA) has unveiled their long-awaited Professional Selling Ethics Framework for world-wide release and incorporation into the UPSA Certification Program for salespeople.

Rick Roberge, author of the Rainmakermaker Blog, Chris Mott, President of Corporate Training at David Kurlan & Associates, and I were reviewing the names of long-term clients of the firm from 1985 through 1995. We are attempting to create an alumni association of people who were Kurlan-trained. We were thrilled to read some of the names we recognized and remembered from 20 years ago.

Today, I witnessed – again – just how ineffective companies are at providing their salespeople with useful tools. The Value Proposition, a frequent offender, earned the honors today. So many salespeople are walking around with what they think are value propositions when in fact they are nothing more than claims, marketing messages, features and benefits. Today’s winner of the worst Value Proposition was ‘we make you money’.