This is a question that is often asked when I speak to managers looking to recruit. It is often uttered by operational staff and managing directors who resent paying salespeople their relatively high market rates. Sales directors sometimes even say it!

But firstly, ARE salespeople paid highly? Well a recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and publishing group Croner, entitled Sales Rewards, suggested that the average basic salary for a middle manager in sales is just over £38,000 – 5.6% higher than the national average for this level. Not a massive difference, but significant.

Interestingly, there are regional variations with sales reps in the North East and North West receiving 10% LESS than people at the equivalent level in other roles.

As a salesperson you are in the almost unique position in the business that you are constantly under the return-on-investment spotlight. Would an HR manager be constantly monitored to see that he was worth each year? Or the health and safety manager? Highly unlikely, even in these recessionary times.

However, the value of a salesperson appears to be easy to measure: if you don’t bring enough new sales to cover a certain multiple of your salary, you are toast!

On a strategic level, this way of thinking is incredibly inefficient and unfair. We are a sales training company after all so I not only have an axe to grind but can show it is not the most profitable rout. But let us put this to one side and deal with the issue head on.

Put simply, you need to show your managers the value you bring to the business. If you are regularly exceeding target all the time, then there is no issue. But, if you are like most salespeople, you have good months and bad months.

So be your own harshest critic: think carefully why you may have come up short. Don’t think of excuses; work out the reasons why. And take corrective action, before your manager needs to.

Sometimes the reasons for missing targets are genuine ones and unavoidable. If it is out of your control, see the storm brewing. Understand that the business demands (fairly or unfairly) that you return adequate return on investment. Start the dialogue with our manager early. Don’t let the threat of the axe come as a surprise.

Like it or loathe it, we need to constantly justify our value to our employers unlike other departments. But we do get better rewarded according to the research!

A recent report by consultancy DDI interviewed 2700 corporate buyers and employees and came up with one statistic that jumped out for me: 72 percent of buyers rated the internet as their first source of information. However, the conclusion of the report was as controversial as the statistic is unsurprising – that the internet allows buyers to “cut out the middleman”.

The presumption is that the salesperson is the middleman. Simply dead weight, a third wheel, a chocolate teapot. Frankly, if that is all the salesperson is being regarded as, then they SHOULD be cut out.

The salesperson’s role is often seen as redundant and unnecessary by so many buyers. And sometimes they are right – bad salespeople should be eliminated from the marketing process and order-taking should be left to someone else.

STRATEGIC
What value are your sales team adding to the transaction? Are they order takers with additional responsibilities, but they are not fulfilling that extra obligation? Or are they “trusted third parties” to prospects and buyers: valued consultants that make sure buyers get the right product each time.

Sales people who believe their role is simply to “close” the deal are order takers. Great salespeople welcome the internet as a tool to educate and empower prospects.

It means that thesedays buyers have a lot of information at their finger tips. But few consumers are able to make the comparisons and come up with the right decision with all this ammunition. The great salesperson can guide them to the right purchase and hopefully this is to buy THEIR product. Or not to buy the product this time if it is not right for prospect.

TACTICAL
One of the most powerful ways a salesperson can build trust is correctly and honestly to tell the prospect that the salesperson’s product is not the right one. At this time. But it may be in the future.

Right now I am looking to upgrade my mobile phone. John represents the 3 network asked the right questions, displayed his knowledge and understanding and concluded that the current handset range did not provide what my company wanted. In so doing, he recommended Jane from a totally different company that COULD provide an appropriate Windows Mobile handset. And Jane is being equally as helpful as John.

We may never know what John’s sales manager thinks of this but one thing is for sure: I have kept John’s details and know I will recommend him as a scrupulous and professional mobile phone contact. He did not make the sale this time but spread £1000s of goodwill. And who knows how much money he might make in the future because he DIDN’T force the sale this time.

Are you building up a bank account of goodwill by being a dependable and honest consultant? Avoid the pressure for the quick sell and you will build up a loyal customer base PLUS you will go a little way to helping lend the lie to the DDI consultancy report conclusions and salespeople being just middlemen.

Sometimes I despair at the reputation that selling has in the UK. Financial services seem to have the worst reputation. The concept of mis-selling seems to be synonymous with that sector. (What about mis-buying and whatever happened to “caveat emptor”?)

You would expected educated and respectable individuals to be above perpetuating the misunderstandings about sales. But just recently I was looking at an excellent web site created by the UK’s financial services authority (FSA - Fsa.gov.uk). The micro site is designed for consumers looking to compare financial products and it does a superb job of doing that, apparently objectively.

However, my heart sank when I saw the strap line writ large on the page:
“No selling. No jargon. Just the facts.”

Time and again we teach delegates that two things to avoid are jargon and vagueness. So, yes, FSA, good on you for dropping the jargon and sticking to the facts. But, surely presenting this information in a comparative table IS a form of selling?

The sobering fact for salespeople is that the FSA has to reassure visitors to its web site that they won’t be sold to. This almost seems like our number one fear as consumers.

It is a tragedy that selling is now seen as such an evil. It will take time, but we as professional salespeople need to work hard to restore the image. Avoiding jargon and sticking to the facts will certainly help.

I have resisted so far blogging about the Olympics because everyone is probably tired of hearing thoughts on how wonderful it is that the Great Britain team have shown our best performance for one hundred years. But the Beijing Olympics has given us more than blanket coverage of obscure sports such as walking, the Madison and pommel horse. Team GB’s astonishing domination of track cycling also gave us the term “aggregation of marginal gains”: a fantastic concept for improving sales results.

The phrase is attributed to Team GB cycling performance director Dave Brailsford. When asked what was the secret to their phenomenal success, he said there was no one secret. It was down to meticulously attending to 1,000 tiny details, each in itself seemingly insignificant. It is this combination of little secrets – the “aggregation of marginal gains” as he dubbed it, that had given our cyclists their winning edge.

A winning edge that meant that 8 golds out of the 17 won by Team GB were in cycling. To get that into context, if the cycling team were a country, they would be SEVENTH in the medals table (as I write)!

So often when we are not getting the results we want in selling, we resort to some “magic bullet”. We search for a secret that will turn things around.

This is especially true in a downturn in the economy as every sales director in the UK must be experiencing right now. So we look at reducing the workforce and keeping only the best performers. Or maybe we need to recruit new, better and super salespeople. Maybe we need to finally work more closely with the marketing department and that will generate the higher volume of leads that we need.

Any one of these factors MIGHT generate a 30% increase in sales from their current level. But this represents looking for a “secret” that might not exist. Why not take the cycling team’s mantra and try to find 1000 tiny details that we can improve. To get a 30% improvement overall, all we need to do is cumulatively increase the performance of 8 things by 3%. Try it on your calculator 103% times 103%, eight times.

Do you think you can find 8 factors such as hours worked, cold calls made, persistence, leads uncovered, etc that you can each improve by 3%? Of course you can. Then you will have generated a 30% improvement in sales by the theory of aggregation of marginal gains.

Microsoft supremo Bill Gates has published a survey arguing that knowledge of IT skills is underrated in UK enterprise. It surveyed the “leaders” of 500 leading UK businesses and found IT rated at seventh, below personal planning and organising. Bill claims that business leaders need to pay more attention to information technology. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

What is interesting to note from a sales person’s perspective is how, despite sales and marketing not figuring in their own rights, the most important characteristics of the top salespeople do figure. Specifically: interpersonal skills, problem solving and verbal communication.

This could be why so many sales and marketing professionals get to a high level in many blue chips. And also the reason why so many of them start businesses.

But what I still find curious is the low esteem with which so many executives hold the sales function. I read HR publications because of my involvement in training and I see the same amount of navel-gazing as when I did my Geography degree.

Not for sales people, such soul-searching. Sales people know precisely what they do. But so many other divisions in businesses undertake the self-analysis that I have seen from HR and marketing professionals in particular.

So why is that sales department knows what it is, exemplifies the main skills required by business leaders, unarguably adds value to the bottom line, but is still regarded with suspicion by so many other divisions in the typical enterprise? Answers on a postcard please!

I have lost count of the number of times sales managers tell me how difficult it is to get their salespeople to do their prospecting calls. And equally I have lost count how many times I have told them not to bother: telemarketers and sales people have almost opposite personality profiles!

What do I mean by personality profiles? This is the essential set of traits that motivates our basest instincts. Sales people are creative emotional types. Telemarketers are systematic level-headed types. You almost never get the sets of traits that typify a successful telemarketer combined with the features of a successful sales person. Similarly, a sales manager is a third type of person again.

Getting a telemarketer to sell or a salesman to telemarket is like pushing a square peg in a round hole.

The solution? Employ a company or individuals to set appointments for the sales people. Salespeople are restless at best when trapped at a desk and disruptive at worst. So get them out on the road. The telemarketer types hate driving around and spending ages building relationships with prospects. They like quick wins and booking appointments!

I am setting aside today as hug-an-agent day because some research out shows exactly how badly we treat them.

Staff in call centres and callers in to them were surveyed by a call centre solutions provider Merchants and they found that 37 per cent of those surveyed admitted that they have shouted and sworn at customer service agents over the telephone. That is more than a third of us hurl abuse at these poor people just doing their job.

Most people reading this blog will be salespeople and some will work in contact centres. But we are all USERS of call centres. And, as people involved in sales, we should treat people in the same way as we expected to be treated.

YOU would certainly not expect to be sworn at and abused when doing your work. You probably have been at some time. And proudly told people that you slammed the phone down gave them as good as you got. Of course, we know this is totally the wrong way to handle irate contacts, but that is another matter! So why would we talk to people in the same way that we hate being talked TO?

More is the point, we need to do something to turn the tide of negative feeling against call centres. Not least because they are here to say. But mainly they are populated with hard working people that deserve more respect.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people come up with an “amusing” strategy of dealing with inbound marketing calls such as walking away from the phone while the agent is talking, asking if the agent minds if the prospect takes their number and calls them back at home, etc. How I laugh (well, I have to pretend it is the first time I have heard the idea and it is the cleverest thing I have heard, because I am empathetic!).

It is no excuse if the call centre agent is in Indo-Asia or if they are new. It does not HELP YOU to be rude to them.

I speak with authority because I used to get quite frustrated with sales agents on the phone. And now I keep my blood pressure down and focus on helping them to help me. The problem is that so many are so badly trained, and that is not THEIR fault. They are, in most cases, paid a fraction of what I get per month and have had many less chances in life than I had.

The advice Merchants give is:
• Set aside sufficient time for your call – don’t try to sort out a complicated enquiry while you
are dashing out of the door or trying to cook a meal
• Remember that the agent you speak to is not always directly responsible for the situation
• Find out who else you may need to speak with to get the situation resolved
• Try to stay calm – politeness is more likely to result in the desired outcome

Wise words indeed. Let’s all “pay it forward” and be nice to people in our industry so we can spread a little happiness in the hope it will come around to us.