The Tests of a Good Salesperson

A few years ago, I contracted to evaluate a 25-person sales force. I accompanied each person into the field to observe a full day of calls on customers and prospects. Of course, a single day may not produce typical results. Furthermore, the results of an observed day are almost certainly better than normal, because sellers (and buyers, for that matter) are likely to be on their best behavior. But sales results were not my immediate concern. I had been asked to account for a wide disparity in sellers’ productivity. My strategy was to look for behavioral differences. I wanted to see whether the ways in which sellers conducted themselves, between calls as well as with customers, could be related to differences in their sales records over a long period. (In the field, I was unaware of anybody’s record, so I was free of bias distortions.) The product was mundane: auto parts. Armed with sample boards and thick catalogs, the salespeople could take orders for literally thousands of parts in myriad varieties and sizes. The customers were mostly owners of repair shops or managers of parts departments in automobile dealerships. These products were essentially commodities. Each seller faced at least a half-dozen competitors, all hawking virtually the same wares. Buyers, of course, were acutely aware of prices and were quick to tell sellers if someone else had offered a better deal. The salespeople did have a certain amount of pricing discretion. But price cuts affected their own income, so they were loath to offer serious concessions. During each call, I stood quietly in the background, observing all I could. Most buyers were only mildly curious about me. The seller explained vaguely that I was “an associate.” Between calls, in the seller’s car, I would scribble my impressions in a notebook and invite the seller to offer his. (All 25 sellers were men.) As I watched, I detected an almost inverse relationship between the size of an order and the amount of effort sellers put into persuasion. Most large orders were obtained without a great deal of selling per se. Within minutes, customers who evidently respected and trusted these salespeople began placing orders, often following their recommendations. These customers seldom commented on prices. So it appeared that large orders were less the result of a seller’s tactics during the call than of relationships built up during previous visits. On the other hand, when sellers pleaded for an order, fought for an order (praising product after product, or price after price), or listened patiently while the customers digressed at length about baseball, politics, the local economy, or anything but the seller’s products—the resulting orders were likely to be small. This outcome also suggested that customers discriminated among sellers and that established relationships determined a customer’s willingness to do business with one (or a few) sellers out of many. For that reason, I eventually decided to study the customers more than the sellers. It was clearly customers’ predisposition to buy, or resist a long sales pitch, or ignore pleas, or use the seller much as a talkative drinker uses a bartender that largely determined the outcome of the call. But what determined that predisposition? Presently I found myself concentrating on three aspects of seller performance that seemed to be connected. They were discussion focus, time management during the call, and staying power. Discussion Focus The first critical factor was what sellers and customers talked about. Who did most of the talking had little importance. Shrewd sellers wanted to discuss which products the customer should order, and preferably at length. In the sales-focused calls, regardless of how much each party had to say about the details of purchase orders, they spoke mainly about those matters the seller wanted to hear. Sales-focused calls tended to produce the largest orders. The opposite of a sales-focused call was an unfocused call, in which most of the conversation involved anything but the products that were supposedly on the agenda. Often the customer voiced complaints about prices, delivery, invoicing, or the products themselves. The conversation could also dwell too long on irrelevant topics like the customer’s preferences among automobiles, baseball teams, or political candidates. The unfocused calls nearly always produced small orders—or no orders at all. Customer complaints and excursions into small talk surfaced in virtually all the observed calls. In sales-focused visits, they were dispensed with quickly; the seller found some deft but gracious way to turn the discussion back to the overriding question: What will today’s order be? But in unfocused calls, the seller’s agenda got short shrift. Not all sales calls, of course, fit neatly into these two categories. In some calls, customers digressed after a few minutes of concentrated buying, and sellers had to find a way to lead them back. Other calls began inauspiciously, and only with some difficulty did the seller manage to center on buying. Why did the sales calls vary in relevant focus? Here is my explanation. The seller makes a claim on the customer’s time. The customer has to decide how much of his or her time the seller is worth and how best to use it. If the customer regards the seller as well informed and reliable, the optimal way to use their time together is to get right down to business. If the seller is seen as inconsequential or annoying, the customer can always get rid of some pent-up frustration by making him listen. Or the customer can treat the unfortunate seller to a dissertation on whatever bothers him at the moment. Of course, that wastes the seller’s time. But that’s his problem, not the customer’s. The focus of discussion seemed to depend on how seriously the customer took the seller. It was a matter of whether a seller had demonstrated both competence and usefulness to the customer. The sellers in this company agreed that these perceptions usually develop during the first three or four calls. After that, they claimed, discussion focus with a given customer tends to follow a pattern. Time Management All the salespeople were reasonably efficient in minimizing the time they spent traveling from one customer to another. Differences in time management began to appear, however, when the seller walked through the customer’s door. Only rarely was the customer accessible immediately. Usually one had to wait. But for how long? Some sellers waited patiently for 20 or 30 minutes until customers made time for them. These calls seldom produced more than small orders. It was almost as if the customer, by giving priority to other matters, was signaling a low regard for the seller’s importance—at least on that occasion. By waiting, a seller also signaled a willingness to be put off, in like manner, during future calls. (Perhaps some of the delays that I witnessed were the logical outcomes of previous delays.) I found that once waiting time exceeded a few minutes, it was unlikely to turn into time well spent. The shrewder sellers read the promptness, or delay, in customers’ appearance as a signal of their disposition to buy on that particular day. If the customer made time for him right away, the customer often had important business to transact. But if a long delay ensued, the wise seller tried to set a more convenient appointment later in the day, or on another day. Then he departed for another sales opportunity elsewhere. During the call itself, customers gave more clues of their predisposition. Some allowed the call to be interrupted frequently, even lengthily. Sellers who sat patiently through these interruptions were seldom rewarded for their patience. Other sellers, recognizing the customer’s preoccupation with other matters, decided against an unpromising battle for attention and courteously withdrew. These sellers were not interested in winning over uninterested customers. They wanted to spend their time with promising prospects. Staying Power Every profession has its folklore, and the selling profession is no exception. Virtually all the salespeople in this group were convinced that there are good days and bad days, and that the outcome is almost preordained. Furthermore, they maintained that they could usually tell what kind of day was in store for them after their first few calls. Their predictions were often accurate. But I thought they were confusing cause with effect. After all, success is exhilarating. A few good orders early in the day brought out the best in them: they exuded subtle signals of knowing what they were talking about and of being someone worth listening to. More important, they remembered the fundamentals. They paid attention to discussion focus and time management. On the other hand, failure is depressing. An unsuccessful call batters the seller’s ego; it bluntly questions one’s competence. A typical seller runs into more rejection in the course of a day than most of us have to absorb in weeks, if not months. From an emotional perspective, selling is a rough way to make a living. Your self-respect is on the line every time you walk through a customer’s door. After several failed calls, some sellers fall into error. Desperate for a success, they may resort to pleading. Unfortunately, that sends the wrong signal to the customer. Sometimes the response is a contemptuous, “Why should I bother with you?” Shrewd customers sense that this caller may be ready to cut prices to the bone. Like a badly shaken athlete, the seller will neglect the fundamentals of the craft. The customer can run on about whatever he or she wants to say. Time management and discussion focusing are forgotten. Gradually I perceived that the early results of a seller’s day predicted the rest of the day only for the weaker sellers. As long as good orders were forthcoming, salespeople were buoyed on a wave of confidence. If they made a few fruitless calls, the confidence of most of them crumbled. Naturally strong sellers encountered rejection, but when they did, they shook it off and clung to the fundamentals. In most cases, successful calls soon followed. The acid test came in the afternoon. Strong sellers regarded lunchtime as an unavoidable interruption of selling time. They hunted for a quick sandwich and then headed for the next customer. Weaker sellers lingered over lunch, cursed the fates that had ordained that day to be so unrewarding, and eventually reentered the fray with low expectations. The distinction was not in whether salespeople knew how to conduct sales calls but in whether they used that knowledge consistently—regardless of any of the barriers they encountered. It was their ability to stay the course that determined whether they would cling to effective methods or fall back in disarray on methods that invited rejection. Measuring Results Once I had completed my observations, company management showed me the sellers’ records. Two ratios seemed to be the best measures of their productivity. One was the percentage of calls resulting in an order (the equivalent of a baseball batting average). The other was the average order per call (gross sales divided by the number of all calls, including unsuccessful ones). For several months preceding the study, these ratios had been more or less stable for each seller. Nine of the 25 sellers, the top producers, had been winning orders in at least 40 % of their calls and had average orders per call exceeding $ 85. Six “promising” producers had exceeded one, but not both, of these ratios. The remaining ten (who were the low producers) had not consistently achieved either ratio. There were 12 more sellers who had left the company before the study, either through resignation or dismissal. Their averages differed insignificantly from those of the still-employed low producers. This did not bode well for the low producers’ prospects. My field notes showed that evidence of appropriate discussion focus, time management, and staying power appeared almost entirely among the top and the promising producers. These observations could not distinguish between the two top groups, but they clearly distinguished both from the bottom group. Wanted: Good Coaches To many a sales manager, a seller either has or hasn’t got “what it takes” to sell. This attitude reduces sales management to a problem of finding the right seller. The difficulty with that approach is that seller turnover rates are often horrendous, leaving many territories poorly covered or not covered at all. Despite the plethora of tests and rating procedures, it is notoriously difficult to forecast a candidate’s sales performance. But that is not the basic problem. The basic problem is the extreme difficulty of the seller’s job. It calls for someone who can tolerate a severe emotional pounding in the absence of a support system, who can adhere steadfastly to certain fundamental methods even when results are disappointing. There just aren’t many such people among us. Furthermore, a sizable portion of them are happily employed, and therefore they are not available in the job market. That is why finding a capable salesperson seeking employment or amenable to an offer is so rare. It is also why so many sales forces have large percentages of turnover-prone low performers. The effective seller is a rare bird. For sales managers, that is the fundamental fact of life. It has two implications: 1. To recruit only to fill vacancies is much too risky. That limits you to those people who happen to be seeking selling positions when you happen to be offering them. The only effective way to capture rare birds is to hunt for them continuously. Continuous recruiting may be costly, but it costs less than constant high turnover. 2. To assume that sellers either have or don’t have “what it takes” leads to a sink-or-swim approach, and most sellers predictably sink. The assumption overlooks the possibility that some promising producers could become top producers or that borderline low producers could be helped into the “promising” ranks. A sink-or-swim approach to training uses our thin supply of effective sellers very inefficiently. Sales managers should be in the field with their low producers, and their new sellers, as much as possible. Like good athletic coaches, they should constantly remind the sellers of the fundamentals, constantly encourage, and constantly praise effective performance. The objective is to break bad habits and to build good ones. The key to maximizing sales productivity is not the improbable quest for more of the few but the ability of the sales manager to give good coaching to the many.

The Tests of a Good Salesperson

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