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HOW TO MANAGE SALESPEOPLE Forget the glad-handing stereotypes. What these folks do is often more complicated than even they realize. Oh salesmen and women, can enough be said in praise of you? You are an elite. To be sure, executives often get paid more, and the munchkins who make the product deserve a certain respect. But who sees to it that the foreplay of commerce is finally consummated, with money changing hands? Salespeople. Who is it, braver and freer than the typical company apparatchik, who goes out alone to confront the dark forces of rejection? Salespeople. Who is it that everyone else in the enterprise depends on ultimately for the realization of the corporate hopes and dreams? Yes, salespeople. To mangle a borrowed phrase, salespeople are where the rubber meets the sky. Unfortunately, the people at the top, immured in the executive suite and far above the battle, too often forget this. Ditto for underlings who occasionally rub up against the elite. Indeed, even sales managers, themselves almost always former sales representatives, sometimes lose their sense of the majesty and mystery of it all. Herewith a little remedial instruction on the nature of the wondrous sales beast and how to get the best from him or her. Controversy still attends the question of whether salespeople are set apart by a distinctive psychology. For years companies have tried to isolate personal characteristics predictive of a knack for selling. But to no avail, maintains Richard Berlet of Triad Consultants, a Chicago firm specializing in sales force compensation: "Most of the evidence indicates there's no way to screen people to determine who will be successful." Says Derek A. Newton, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School: "I have spent 700 or 800 days of my life accompanying sales reps on calls, and about the only generalization I can make about the good ones is that they have a desire to sell and quick intelligence." Other experts are less reticent about suggesting a few traits common to the sales breed. Says Bernard Cullen of Charles River Consulting, which helps companies with sales training: "In managing salespeople, the key thing is understanding that they really value their autonomy and independence." Enough in many cases to take jobs that can keep them on the road, and away from family and colleagues, for long periods. On the other hand, Cullen observes, "they need goals set for them with a maximum of clarity," goals to measure themselves against in their drive for achievement. Still other experts point to the considerable ego strength, or reserves of self-esteem, that the job demands. Robert L. Berl, a marketing professor at Memphis State and a former salesman, testifies: "As a sales rep you get one hell of a lot more noes than yeses, and you can't take the noes personally." Put all the traits of a successful salesman together, a wiseacre double-dome type might argue, and you get a self-starting hard-charging paragon of a go-getter, almost a mythic American figure, with one perhaps characteristically American vulnerability: a willingness, indeed eagerness, to be judged according to a dollar-and-cents standard. Or maybe on that and his golf score. And what of the salesman's fabled bonhomie, the Willy Lomanesque emphasis on the importance of being liked? Wildly overblown the experts say, part of a dated stereotype that may have contained some truth 50 years ago but that bears little resemblance to today's man or woman selling, say, computer systems. Argues Cullen: "People who are out there on their own, not under the immediate scrutiny of management, have to exert a high level of control over themselves. Getting your paperwork done at night when you're on the road takes discipline." Too much bonhomie can make for bad sales performance. Cullen again: "The average salesperson falls down by getting too involved in the relationship with the customer, so involved he may forget to close the deal. Or he will end up championing the customer at the expense of his own company." He might complain, say, that only he really cares about the client, or make nasty cracks about the Order Prevention Department. What does work for a salesman is, apparently, extraordinary adaptability. "The best salesmen are able to deal with lots of different situations," concludes University of Florida professor Barton A. Weitz, who has done extensive research on the subject. Confront them with a hand-buzzer-and-whoopee-cushion purchasing agent and they will yuk it up. Put them face to face with a dour CPA type and they will talk the numbers soberly and expertly. "They are chameleons," says Weitz. Does this make them manipulative, as some critics charge, always ready to shift masks to gain advantage? No, Weitz maintains: "They don't do it consciously." To manage sales types, good and bad, you have to be able to live with paradox. For starters you need to respect their independence, trusting them even though they are out of sight, as they will be most of the time. "If you are a worrywart, you probably won't find sales management a rewarding job," says professor Newton. At the same time, you must realize that your reps do require management, even the best of them. In fact, many hunger after the right kind. The right kind, in a word, is coaching, a notion that seems to have been around in sales management for years but only recently has caught on in the general literature on how bosses should behave. This does not mean, of course, that sales managers have actually practiced what was preached to them. No, their most common mistake, the experts say, continues to be confusing "Let's do it together" with "Watch my smoke": Sales manager and rep go on one of the subordinate's calls together. Rep gets into a little trouble. Instead of letting the tyro make mistakes and helping him learn from them, the manager, himself probably an ace salesman, steps in to save the day with his incomparable technique. Sadly, by then the rep is probably too flustered and abashed to learn anything from his boss's display. Better for the manager to help plot a strategy for the call beforehand. He can then go along in a capacity that, in Anglo-Saxon judicial councils, went by the name oathhelper, that is, a supporter of what the principal speaker has to say. Afterward the manager can praise the subordinate for what he did right and focus on one bit of behavior to be improved. Just one, the experts emphasize; the rep will remember little or nothing from a battery of suggestions. Managers, and companies in their sales training programs, also must be careful not to coach reps to do the wrong thing. Here much error arises from confusing two richly different phenomena: the simple sale, which may be completed in one encounter--say, at the front door or just possibly in a used car lot--and the complex sale, which entails more than one meeting. Maybe the foremost expert on the difference between the two is Neil Rackham, an Englishman who says his Huthwaite research firm in Purcellville, Virginia, has spent 15 years sitting in on and analyzing 35,000 sales calls. What proves effective in making a simple sale, including some precepts enshrined in the abundant how-to literature, may spell death to a complex sale. Take closing, says Rackham, who has done some 20 separate studies of the art of asking for the order. "If your people are doing small sales, then teaching them closing techniques will improve their success rate," he says. "But if you use the same closing techniques in large sales, it damages your hit rate." Why? "There are good psychological reasons," says Rackham. "If you pressure somebody for a small decision, they are likely to give way. But if you pressure somebody for a large decision, it creates counterpressure." You will also want to give your reps straight dope on the company's product strategies, which would seem a no-brainer if it weren't for all the enterprises that fail to do it. Says Robert Bardagy, executive VP for marketing at Comdisco, the big computer-leasing outfit: "You have to keep them apprised of the corporate direction. They should feel that even though they're not at the central office, they're part of the process." It helps, too, if you give the troops some latitude to dicker on terms within boundaries set down by the strategy. Consultant Jerome Colletti of the Alexander Group maintains, "Salespeople have to be price negotiators, not just price quoters." And how do you reward them for their efforts? Yes, you can pay them on a commission-only basis, particularly if you just want them to ring as many doorbells as possible. But don't expect much managerial leverage that way. The sales staff will simply sell the products they have always had the most success with. What they probably won't do: push new offerings that, while more important to the company, are harder to sell; spend a lot of time providing follow-up service to customers; take time to cultivate new prospects. If you hope to have some say in what your salespeople do, you will have to treat them, in this one respect, like other employees: You will have to pay them a salary, which you then can supplement with commissions or a bonus. But you must also continue to lavish attention, praise, and even love on these, the workaday heroes of capitalism. It's only their due. |