Lost art of Selling

 

Have Sales people lost the ‘art’, ‘skill’ and desire to sell?

Anyone involved in working with Sales departments back in the late sixties and seventies, would be familiar with droves of external sales people driving the length and breadth of the UK in Marina’s, Cortina’s or Mondeo’s, oft loaded with leaflets and pamphlets to aid them close a sale when meeting clients.

These were days when sales leads were self created, before the dawn of faxes, emails, electronic communication and of course social networks; heady days of cool 8mm early John Cleese sales training films, some of which I recall when working with the Rank organisation. Training may have been basic but the fundamental message of knowing your customer, knowing how to win and close a sale and the drive and energy needed to achieve this was focussed and precise. In those days too, Sales Managers had significant responsibility in training internal Sales people on how to make calls, close or win the sale and how to hit sales targets.

As we approached the mid-eighties and the arrival of faxes, the first desktop computers and new marketing mediums of video cassettes/CD’s, we began to see a slow and gradual decline in the number of external sales people or account managers, as they had begun to be called. 

Decline gathered pace in the 90’s and with the web, email, and new forms of marketing and global market reach, one could argue we witnessed the death of the salesman and the rise of the reactive marketer or sales processor, ergo, “you know what we sell, you can see what we charge so give us a call or come on in”.

We saw more incoming than outgoing sales calls, greater emphasis on working with spreadsheets, especially sales managers, who found little time to train their teams or better still, understand the underlying reasons for either missing or hitting performance targets. A radical and misplaced corporate mindset that distanced low volume clients into placing orders on line with no account manager, a move designed to reduce the cost of selling and not the cost of sale (with flawed assessment). Constant switching of account managers with little or no continuity or sales flow-through and all too easy (and yet damaging) focus on volume targets that invariably end up going through ‘now buying’ volume clients already at wafer-thin margin.

If a sales person has some 20 accounts to manage but only 10 are regular buyers and 5 of these account for 70% of sales target, it’s obvious where it’s ‘easiest’ to hit that higher volume, for the lazy salesman and for convenience,  it’s with those 5 major clients.

I recall.....

A new salesman inherited some 20 accounts and with three of these capable of delivering some 60% of his sales quota. Around 15 had credit lines, varying in value and 5 of these had placed no orders in the last 4 months. His focus therefore appeared to be just of those 10 that had credit and were more regular buyers. According to him, he did not have the time to work the full 20 accounts allotted to him, and worse, knew little or next to nothing of the 10 accounts that were infrequent buyers or had no credit, even though some of those with no credit had historical cumulative sales values attached. As so often happens, he asked for increased credit lines for those 3 stalwart major clients (not always available) and resisted any attempt to work his database more fully.

To his credit, he agreed to spend an hour with me so that I could show him precisely what I was driving at. I had at my disposal his preceding three month sales values with gross margin and spent a little time researching the 17 accounts that were not considered major clients with greater emphasis on those that had not purchased for four months and the 5 accounts that had no credit.

I pointed out that across all his 15 clients with credit applied, his ten regular recent total receivable values at month end amounted to less than 60% of total credit available and ergo he had 40% capacity unused. I further advised some merited a higher credit line, potentially pushing his credit utilisation to less than 50%. I also turned to the 5 accounts with no credit but with previous history of trade. I showed 3 of these were sound companies that merited good credit. I turned to the web page of one and pointed out the nature of their business, product supplied and how many of these we were in a position to supply – ‘most of them’ he replied, sheepishly and with a grin on his face...

By now he began to grasp where I was heading...

His gross margin for the 3 major volume clients was just 3% while the other 7 accounts provided a more generous 9%. 

Given the additional credit I could offer across those 7, the other five irregular buyers and three of those with no current credit line I suggested he and his sales manager conduct simple’ what if’ scenarios in terms of the increased credit availability on less frequent buyers (at higher margin) and greater use of credit availability across his client base would mean in terms of incremental sales and margin.

A fascination remains how Credit too often fails to see the real significance of information and statistical data it has at its fingertips. 

Credit is a selling process, delivering not only incremental sales but vitally, more profitable sales too.