Peter O'Donnell: selling as a science.

When designing a new office building, the first step is to describe its intended purpose, overall shape and dimensions.

The detail of the building becomes more specific in ensuing phases but, at all times a standard language is employed, especially for detailed dimensions and engineering specifications. These building standards are required for coherency of design, to minimise error, guarantee fit and integration of components, health and safety, efficiency of build, and for ongoing maintenance and support.

Fit for purpose

You might now be asking: ‘What has an office building and the sales force got in common?’ The answer is that, if either is not fit for purpose, despite the money and effort spent, buildings will fail to deliver what is required and, in recessions, only the fittest sales organisations will survive.

Specifying sales capability

When it comes to the sales force – despite its importance in delivering the business strategy and performance metrics – specifying what is needed tends to be quite general. ‘What we need are salespeople who have experience in our products (or services), understand our markets and how to introduce our products to existing and/or prospective customers; they must have done it before. They should be energetic, hard-working, focused and well-led. Someone with two to three years of selling for the competition would be a good start, preferable with a degree, smart and well-spoken. And in recession, we need them to work harder and faster and for less.’ Such statements are commonplace.

However, a good way of looking at sales capability required for your business in a recession is through the capability models defined by the author of SPIN and world leader in sales research and techniques, Professor Neil Rackham. He believes that there are five levels of selling complexity and that each requires equally capable salespeople to operate.

For simple transactions of products and services, e-commerce, retail shops and telesales should suffice. However, for consultative and complex sales where an expensive human element (a sales force) is required, a multiplicity of factors to consider includes:

• changes in business strategy and objectives due to a recession;
• the competition;
• markets, product groups and their maturity;
• client buying processes and their complexity;
• the economic cycle;
• your sales force’s required capability;
• the sales management team; and
• business partnerships, amongst many other factors.

This all means that the ‘ideal’ description for a sales force will differ according to who is asked and for every situation. That can be serious if the targets, objectives and budgets given to the sales force are not achieved.

To take a parallel from the sports world, recruitment requirements vary considerably according to the sport – basketball is very different from synchronised swimming. This seems obvious in the sports world but not so in sales…

And when your business strategy, customers, competition, markets and economy change, as they will in a recession, it can be a simple matter of changing the benchmark to redefine the new requirement for successfully selling into the changed environment. Learning needed to achieve improved performance will be obvious and it will be easier to get individual buy-in.

Complex role

Although it is unlikely that use of the term ‘salesperson’ will go away, the complex role of helping companies buy what will help them achieve their business strategy and performance objectives, probably makes such salespeople more like business consultants – especially in a recession. When combined with the appropriate level of educational qualification, hiring, training and managing these people to guarantee a company will achieve its targets is quite a complex but scientific process.

With selling becoming more of a science than art, it requires an approach that many organisations have been unwilling to adopt. Those who have are achieving considerable advantage over their competition, making them and their sales force recession ‘fit-for-purpose’.

To discuss this article, please post your view in the Reader Forum. To contact Peter O’Donnell, partner at Ergon, call 01908 365 300 or 07887 520 406, or email pod@ergon-it.com.

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