Submit Chapter 2 Breakout Questions 2, 4, 6, & 11 on page 64.2. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.
Write “pros” on the top left and “cons” on the top right. Now, from your own
perspective come up with as many issues as you can on both sides regarding
relationship selling as a career choice for you. Be sure to note why you list
each item as you do.
4. Telecommuting and using a virtual office are major
aspects of many professional sales positions. How do you feel about
telecommuting and virtual office in a job? What aspects of telecommuting and
virtual office are most and least attracted to?
6. Review the top 20 key success factors for relationship
selling as listed in Exhibit 2.3. Which of these factors are currently your
strongest points? Which need the most work? How do you plan to capitalize on
the strengths and improve on the weaknesses?
11. In the past, salespeople tended to have the edge over
most buyers in terms of information. However, over the past 15 years access to
timely and accurate information related to their business has changed how
purchasing agents view their jobs. For one thing, they have been able to get a
better handle on their costs and better determine which items to buy and from
whom. How has this proliferation of information affected the relationship, both
interpersonally and professionally, between purchasing agents and the sales
reps calling on them?
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C H AP T E R
2
The Process of Selling
and Buying
TH E CA S E F OR A F OC U S ON T HE SALES PROCESS
In the old world of selling, a salesperson departed the office in the morning and hopefully
returned in the afternoon with newly signed contracts in his or her brief-case. As long as
the contracts kept coming in, what happened between the salesperson’s departure and
return was of little consequence to sales management. Although this mode of selling was
once an acceptable way of life, it has fallen out of favor with sales management for at least
two good reasons:
1. This is not a teachable, repeatable way to sell. Consequently, it cannot be leveraged
across a sales force or used to train new salespeople when they come on board. If sales
management has no definition of how they want their salespeople to sell, then their
only means of improvement is to fire the least productive salespeople and roll the dice
on the next. Formal sales processes allow a company to scale its sales force by teaching
its salespeople how to succeed.
2. With no process steps or milestones, it is impossible to measure and manage the
improvement of the sales force. If all a sales manager knows is the number of people
who departed in the morning and the number of contracts that returned in the afternoon, there is no way to identify opportunities for improvement. Formal sales processes
are required to measure and manage a sales force.
c.:::…Chally Group>
–
World-class sales organizations understand this and strive to develop standard operating
procedures for their people to follow.
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Sell How Your Customers Buy
Ultimately, it is the customer who decides whether or not a salesperson gets the sale. They
usually award the prize to the salesperson that has been there with them during every step
of their buying cycle, meeting customer need after customer need by presenting the right
information at the right time. To win a sale then, a salesperson’s sales process must match
perfectly with the customer’s buying process. The two should be mirror images.
All too often, though, sales forces define their sales processes from their own perspective, not the customer’s. This puts them at risk of calling on the wrong people, at the wrong
time, with the wrong message. Inappropriate sales processes probably kill more sales than
sales managers will ever know.
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When formalizing sales processes, world-class sales forces view their actions from the
customer’s perspective. They design a way of selling that is reflective of the way their customer buys, not just the way they want to sell. The deck is therefore stacked in their favor
when they compete with other salespeople who are making it up as they go along.
Clearly Define Your Selling Roles
The tasks of selling are becoming more complicated. Particularly in a business-to-business
environment, any given sale may involve interactions with several different buyer types,
such as an end-user, chief financial officer, business unit leader, etc. To address this reality, sales forces have been required to bring several corresponding seller types into these
pursuits, such as an account manager, technical specialist, financial analyst, and others.
This team approach to selling is very powerful, but it presents formidable challenges in
coordinating the participants to avoid overlapping tasks or leaving tasks unattended.
World-class sales forces that engage in complex, team sales are careful to have clearly
defined the roles and responsibilities for each and every team member. This helps to ensure
that the customer’s buying needs are being met by the proper type of seller, so they can
proceed through their buying process without delay or frustration. It also avoids internal
friction among the sellers, which lets sales executives manage instead of playing the role
of arbitrator.
Source: Chally Group Worldwide (2012).
L E AR NING OB JECTI VES
©
This chapter focuses on the process of selling and buying in the organizational marketplace. Many factors are driving the world of professional selling toward a relationshipbased approach. This transformation has created a challenging, invigorating, and rewarding environment in which to pursue a career in selling.
Knowledge of the drivers of change in selling, the key success factors required in selling,
the activities salespeople perform on the job, and the different kinds of selling jobs available
go a long way toward helping a person make a decision if he or she might like to pursue
selling as a career path. Successful salespeople always understand the roles that different
individuals within the client company play in moving the relationship along, the buying
decision process used by their clients, and how their clients go about making different types
of purchases and how those differences impact the salesperson’s approach to the client.
After reading this chapter you should be able to
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Recognize the key drivers of change in selling and sales management.
Understand the best practices in selling that lead to exceeding customer expectations.
Explain the historical basis for stereotypical views of selling in society.
Point out a variety of reasons why sales jobs can be highly satisfying.
Identify and explain key success factors for salesperson performance.
Discuss and give examples of different types of selling jobs.
List and explain the role of various participants in an organizational buying center.
Describe the relationship between buying centers and selling centers and the nature of
team selling.
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• Outline the stages in organizational buyer decision making.
• Point out the nature of different organizational buying situations.
D R I V E RS O F C H ANGE IN S E L L ING AND SALES
MA N A G E M ENT
The nature of selling has changed. Sales organizations are being reinvented to better address the needs of the changing marketplace. Six critical drivers of change
have been identified in reinventing sales organizations so they can compete successfully in today’s selling environment:
1. Building long-term relationships with customers. This includes assessing customer
value and focusing on high-priority customers.
2. Creating sales organizational structures that are more nimble and adaptable to the
needs of different customer groups. To compete effectively today, firms must be willing and able to customize the sales effort to meet different customers’ preferred
ways of doing business. Flexibility is a key asset of modern sales organizations.
3. Gaining greater job ownership and commitment from salespeople. This can be accomplished by removing functional barriers within the organization and by leveraging the team experience.
4. Shifting sales management style from commanding to coaching. Or, put another way,
today’s sales managers must create an environment that allows salespeople to
use their talents and abilities to successfully secure, build, and maintain relationships with profitable customers. While item 3 implies that in the past, organizational structure was a common stumbling block to salesperson success, item
4 recognizes that sales managers themselves also are often guilty of blocking
successful relationship selling. For selling to change, management of salespeople
must also change accordingly.
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5. Leveraging available technology for sales success. Clearly, salespeople today have
more types of technological tools at their disposal than ever before. The sales
organizations that make the best use of technology will have a strong competitive edge over others.
6. Better integrating salesperson performance evaluation. A real weakness of many sales
organizations in the past was in how they evaluated and ultimately rewarded
their salespeople. The move from transactional selling to relationship selling,
coupled with the use of selling teams and a more coaching style of management,
necessitates rethinking the performance evaluation and reward process for sales
organizations. In Chapters 12 and 13, this critical topic will be discussed in the
context of developing a more seamless performance management system that
incorporates the full range of activities and outcomes relevant within sales jobs
today.1
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©
OV E R V IE W OF SELLI NG AS A CAREER
This chapter provides you with important insights to better understand the world
of contemporary selling. First, you will have the opportunity to take a look at selling as a potential career path, including the many attractive aspects that explain
why selling is such a popular and rewarding job. Sales jobs in the twenty-first century contribute significantly to the world economy and of course to the success of
individual firms in the marketplace. But like any other position, misunderstandings
exist among people that have never been in selling about what the jobs are really
like—and many of these misperceptions are based on stereotypes about selling that
are best put out in the open and discussed right now. Then, you will learn about
factors that can make one salesperson more successful than another, as well as what
activities salespeople perform and different types of sales positions. Finally, we turn
the tables and you get to see what organizational buying is all about.
Let’s begin by dispelling some myths and mistaken impressions about selling in
general. This is a true fact: well-run selling initiatives can produce enthusiasm and
job satisfaction for salespeople, yet despite this, recruiting and keeping excellent
salespeople can be very difficult. One reason is that, unfortunately, some college
students hold certain negative attitudes toward selling as a career because they
think of the field based on old styles of selling where salespeople used hard-sell
techniques to get buyers to do things they didn’t really want to do and buy products they didn’t really need.
Where do these notions come from? For one thing, the old style of selling is
embodied in icons of media through the decades including plays, movies, and television shows. Probably the most famous play by an American author is Arthur
Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Death of a Salesman, which most students encounter
sometime during their high school or college English courses, Miller immortalized
old-style selling through the play’s principal character, Willie Loman (as in “low
man” on the totem pole of life). Poor Willie left for long sales trips on the road at
the beginning of every week, returned a tired and disheartened peddler at the end
of every week, and worked his customers based “on a smile and a shoeshine.” His
family was collapsing in his absence, his self-esteem was at rock bottom, his customers were defecting to other vendors at an alarming rate, and there seemed to be
no hope of improvement for Willie on any front. This awful image, while certainly
dramatic, has emblazoned on every schoolkid who ever read or acted in the play a
sad, demoralizing image of selling.
A classic movie that also dramatically reinforces negative stereotypes about
salespeople is 1992’s Glengarry Glen Ross, adapted from David Mamet’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning play of the same name. It features a stellar cast, including Al Pacino
and Jack Lemmon, and has become an incredible cult favorite as a pay-per-view.
In the movie, times are tough at Premier Properties, a boiler-room real estate sales
company. Shelly “The Machine” Levene and Dave Moss are veteran salesmen, but
only Ricky Roma is on a hot sales streak. Sales leads for the new Glengarry property
development could turn everything around, but the front office is holding the leads
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back until the “losers” prove themselves on the street. Then someone decides to
steal the Glengarry leads and leave everyone else wondering who did it. The verbal
exchanges among these men desperate to make sales are riveting and very scary to
someone interested in sales as a possible career.
Then in the 2000s came the TV show The Office, which it started in Britain and
was exported to the U.S. The “office” that is subject of the show is a branch of a
fictional old-school office supply sales firm Dunder Mifflin. The salespeople use all
forms of gimmicks and hard-sell tactics in a desperate struggle to try to stay ahead
of the big box retailers like Staples, Office Max, and Office Depot as well as the
general trend toward a paperless office. If you’re into retro TV, you can catch reruns
of the classic WKRP in Cincinnati, about a lovable cast of characters employed at a
third-rate rock-and-roll radio station. One character who was arguably not so lovable was station sales manager Herb Tarleck. Herb was played as a back-slapping,
white-shoe-and-polyester-suit-wearing buffoon who exhibited questionable ethics
and made sales only through pure dumb luck. Google “Herb Tarleck WKRP” for fun
and you’ll see what we’re talking about!
These images of salespeople have become embedded in the global culture. It is
true that some unprofessional and unethical salespeople always have existed and
always will exist (just as unprofessional people exist in any profession—witness the
crisis in accounting, banking, and housing during the recent global recession. In
selling, we seem to have to prove our value to society just a little more than in other
professions. But the effort is worth it to those who love the profession, because
there’s no doubt about it—sales jobs are important to society, they’re challenging
and invigorating to those who occupy them, and they are also potentially one of
the most rewarding career tracks available.
Why Sales Jobs Are So Rewarding
For most professional salespeople, it is precisely the complexity and challenge of their
jobs that motivate them to perform at a high level and provide a sense of satisfaction
with their choice of careers. A number of satisfaction surveys over the years have
found generally high levels of job satisfaction among professional salespeople across
a broad cross section of firms and industries. Although these surveys did find some
areas of dissatisfaction, that unhappiness tended to focus on the policies and actions
of the salesperson’s firm or sales manager, not on the nature of the sales job itself.2
Why are so many professional salespeople generally quite satisfied with their
jobs? Some attractive aspects of selling careers include the following:
©
1. Autonomy, or the freedom of action and opportunities for personal initiative.
2. Multifaceted and challenging activities as part of the job, sales activities that
will be addressed later in this chapter.
3. Financial rewards—salespeople hired right out of college, for example, tend to
start at higher salaries than most other professions and also tend to keep up well
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during their careers with the compensation of their peers outside of sales (due to
the nature of sales compensation being linked directly to performance).
4. Favorable working conditions, often via telecommuting with a virtual office,
and with less minute-to-minute direct supervision than most other careers.
5. Excellent opportunities for career development and advancement.
High Job Autonomy
A common complaint among workers in many professions is that they are too
closely supervised. They complain about the micromanagement of bosses and
about rules and standard operating procedures that constrain their freedom to do
their jobs as they see fit. Salespeople, on the other hand, spend most of their time
working directly with customers with no one around to supervise their every move.
They are relatively free to organize their own time and to get the job done in their
own way as long as they show good results.
The freedom of a selling career appeals to people who value their independence,
who are confident they can cope with most situations they will encounter, and
who like to show personal initiative in deciding how to get their job done. However, with this freedom comes responsibilities and potential pressures. Salespeople
are responsible for managing their existing customer relationships and developing
new ones. Although no one closely supervises the salesperson’s behavior, management usually keeps close tabs on the results of that behavior: sales volume, quota
attainment, expenses, and the like. To be successful, then, salespeople must be able
to manage themselves, to organize time wisely, and to make the right decisions
about how to do the job.
High Job Variety
If variety in a job is the spice of life, sales jobs are hot peppers. Most people soon
become bored doing routine tasks. Fortunately, boredom is seldom a problem
among professional salespeople, as sales positions tend to be high in job variety.
Each customer has different needs and problems for which the salesperson can
work to develop unique solutions. Those problems are often anything but trivial,
and a salesperson must display insight, creativity, and analytical skill to close a
sale. Many sales consultants expect creative problem solving to become even more
important to sales success in the future.
©
Opportunities for Rewards
To make the sales job even more interesting, as we learned in Chapter 1 the internal and external environment is constantly changing. Salespeople must frequently
adjust their sales presentations and other activities to shifts in economic and competitive conditions. For many people in the selling profession, variety and chalY
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lenge are the most rewarding aspects of their jobs. Sales jobs offer great opportunity
for developing a sense of accomplishment and opportunities for personal growth.
As we will see in Chapter 6, these are important sources of intrinsic rewards and
satisfaction—that is, rewards inherent to satisfaction derived from elements of the
job or role itself, as opposed to extrinsic rewards, which are rewards bestowed on
the salesperson by the company.
Make no mistake, though, selling can be a very lucrative profession in terms
of extrinsic rewards as well. More important, the growth of a salesperson’s earnings—particularly the earnings of someone receiving a large proportion of incentive pay—is determined largely by performance, and often no arbitrary limits are
placed on the maximum amount a salesperson can earn. Consequently, a salesperson’s compensation can grow faster and reach higher levels than that of personnel
in other departments at comparable levels in an organization.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the median annual salary for a sales
manager was $98,530 in 2010. The best-paid 10 percent made around $166,400.
Favorable Working Conditions
If the stereotypes of sales jobs addressed earlier were true, salespeople would be
expected to travel extensively, live on big expense accounts, spend much of their
time entertaining potential clients, and consequently have little time for home and
family life. Such a situation represents a lack of balance between one’s work life and
family life such that work is encroaching on family—work–family conflict. Again,
this is not an accurate description of the working conditions encountered by most
salespeople. Some selling jobs require extensive travel, but the majority of salespeople can secure rewarding positions that allow them to be at home most every night.
Indeed, with the increasing use of computer networks, e-mail, video conferencing,
and the like, the trend for more than a decade has been for more and more salespeople to telecommute. That is, they work from a remote or virtual office such as
out of the home and seldom even travel to their companies’ offices.3
For all the advantages and attractiveness of telecommuting to the salesperson, as
well as the efficiencies and cost-sa …
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