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Page 1 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship? By Michael J. Webb
Almost every executive I’ve talked to in the last seven years has acknowledged that their
sales and marketing operations are a mess. They struggle to find enough prospects, yet
many of their brochures have little content people want to read, and their websites are not
optimized for search engines (or anything else, for that matter). Salespeople work their
hearts out trying to find sales opportunities, and once found, too many prospects continue
to stall, or look for lower prices.
When a sales department is not making its numbers, it is natural to assume there must be
something wrong in the sales department.
Yet that assumption deserves to be challenged.
Actually, there are lots of unchallenged assumptions in the way most companies go to
market. Most companies haven’t even considered what should happen when prospects hit
the “submit” button on their websites. They leave the marketing up to the marketing
department, and the selling up to the sales department (who likely have received some
sales training). Unfortunately, at best, the whole organization is oriented to sell the way
customers bought 10 or 15 years ago.
Obviously, the Internet and search engines have a huge impact on businesses. Some
people believe corporations struggle with sales and marketing these days because
business executives don’t understand and are fearful of the new world of fully integrated
(Internet) selling and marketing.
In truth, the problem goes deeper than that. The problem goes to how you define
“salesmanship” in the first place.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 2 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Salesmanship is Not Just the Sales Department’s Problem
Suppose you were MasterLift (www.masterlift.com) and needed to sell more forklift
trucks. Your business is mundane. You sell to facilities managers, logistics executives,
and, yes, to workers who drive those trucks. How do you grab attention, and even launch
a new product line in a market like this? Do you:
• Invest large sums of money in branding, product, or channel development?
• Hire hotshot salespeople and pay them big bucks to bring in business?
• Command your distributors and salespeople to work harder?
• Analyze the sales process in agonizing analytical detail?
Of course, none of those is the right answer.
Figure 1: “Pimp Your Lift”
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 3 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The right answer is to re-examine what your customers want, and find a way to give it to
them. Masterlift’s prospects and customers were going through the same old channels
they always went through. MasterLift realized that the bottleneck in their sales funnel
was at the top: getting the attention of more people who need to buy lift trucks.
MasterLift found something their customers wanted that no one was offering. They
created a simple initiative that attacked their bottleneck simply, and brilliantly. Figure 1
illustrates their clever idea, which they call “Pimp Your Lift.” A great short video tells
the story at http://www.smartinitiatives.com/?p=224 .
It is a great example of salesmanship, isn’t it? Figuring out what your customer wants,
and giving it to them. That’s as old as the hills. Yet, Masterlift’s sales department is not
primarily responsible for this initiative (though they probably supported it
enthusiastically). Further, while the Internet surely makes this marketing campaign less
expensive to conduct, and engages the audience more effectively (you can create your
own truck “design” on a web page, for example), the campaign could have been created
and implemented even if the Internet didn’t exist.
We’ve been trained for decades that marketing and selling are two different things, yet
MasterLift is great evidence that when the sales department is not making its numbers,
the solution to the problem might not be in the sales department.
Salesmanship is in the Sizzle and the Steak
“Fine,” you say: “That is nothing but sizzle.” Perhaps “pimp” is not your taste, or
something like that won’t work in your market – or perhaps someone else has already
won that battle and you’re suffering as a result. What is good salesmanship then?
Consider another mundane, yet brilliant, example – Figure 2 illustrates all the essential
characteristics of effective steak-and-potatoes salesmanship – albeit in a print ad.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 4 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Figure2: Johnson Controls Ad
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 5 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This piece is obviously valuable to readers who are responsible for management and
maintenance of buildings. The headline makes it easy to understand the point. It delivers
the steak, not just the sizzle, because it conveys valuable information – and makes an
offer that is easy to follow up on.
This is “direct response marketing,” and it has worked marvelously since it was invented
and written about over 80 years ago by Claude Hopkins in his book “Scientific
Advertizing.” Often called “salesmanship in print,” the actual salesmanship is in the
planned steps that result in a buyer’s actions.
All businesses in all kinds of industries can follow the pattern illustrated here. Although
the example is from a trade magazine, it precisely mimics the behavior of an effective
salesperson:
• go where the prospects and customers are
• earn their respect and trust by informing them of something they need to know
• make it easy for them to take the next step
It is easy to see how this approach would work on the Internet too:
• Pay-per-click ad campaign è Landing page è Opt-in è White paper (valuable
information) è Inquiry for an assessment
It is interesting to note that all around us on the Internet we are seeing the wholesale
automation of all kinds of sales processes, and it has little or nothing to do with the CRM
software companies struggle to get their salespeople to use.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 6 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Salesmanship is Pay for Performance
A good salesperson’s skills are extremely valuable, and difficult to develop. That is why
they are usually well paid for performance. Likewise, direct-response marketing is also
about pay for performance. Businesses must make money!
And, customers will buy things that make money for them.
The genius of the free market is that people who find better ways of doing things are
rewarded. Value is created when people take actions. Customers take actions when they
pay attention to your headline, give you information, consider your offer, and, ultimately,
when money changes hands. Interacting with them to earn their trust is essential if you
are ever to earn any of their money. The battle ground is across the entire range of your
relationship with customers:
• How your market presence is perceived
• The value added by your salespeople’s interactions with customers
• The capabilities of your product and how it is serviced and supported
Markets reward companies that do any of these things better. Winners in the market are
the companies that cause the largest number of the right customers to move through the
stages of their buying process.
Yet, many excellent salespeople toil for years in companies that assume selling is the
sales department’s problem. Someone else decides the “brand,” designs the brochures
and websites, and the products, and sets their quotas. Someone else sets the service
department’s objectives and budgets.
After all, salespeople are supposed to sell, aren’t they?
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 7 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Salesmanship is a System
Good salespeople acting on their own study their prospects and customers. They observe
what they do, not just what they say. They search for motives and desires, for hooks and
reasons that support their case. Stereotypes aside, good salespeople are organized, keep
records, and are analytical. They can be counted on to succeed when the things that need
to be controlled are within their grasp.
What happens when the things salespeople need to control are outside their grasp? Are
salespeople supposed to create marketing strategies, or multi-step direct-response
campaigns?
Look around your company and ask the question, “Who’s job is it to make selling easier
around here? Who’s job is it to improve how selling and marketing are done? Who is
making it easier for the customer to buy from us?”
Most companies struggle in sales and marketing because their management system is not
designed to do this job. Instead of clarifying what we are producing (specific sequences
of customer actions), and designing the organization around that, businesses have stuck
with outmoded concepts of what sales and marketing are supposed to do.
Every kid who has ever started a lemonade stand with their buddies learns to put the flow
of activity and customer interaction first; and then assign the people accordingly.
Unfortunately, sales and marketing management wrongly assumes optimizing the parts
will optimize the whole:
• marketers – we want you go up and down the block all day telling people about
our lemonade stand
• sellers, we want you to be pouring lemonade cups whether people buy them or
not, because the more cups you fill on the table, the more chance someone will
buy them
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 8 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
• OK, everybody, since we are not making the numbers, we want you work harder!
By contrast, production management systems in manufacturing organizations are clearly
designed to measure the creation of value via raw material, work in process, and finished
goods. Process excellence assesses every activity against a standard of value add vs
waste. Their languages of production, engineering, accounting, and quality are all
translatable. Every word and generalization can be traced to specific observable aspects
of reality – and this is done often.
Sales and marketing management is hobbled by myopic assumptions that marketing is
about the “Four Ps,” and salespeople are accountable for results. Executives and
managers fret about why the sales forecast is so unreliable, why they can’t get
salespeople to do what they are supposed to (such as to sell “solutions” instead of
products, and make quota). They spend money on “branding campaigns” without
knowing what steps they will get customers to take, or how to measure them.
Your company probably has some great salespeople. Yet it is quite likely that the
corporation itself lacks systemic salesmanship altogether.
Salesmanship Responds to Customer Needs
This unseen problem is exacerbated as markets evolve. For example, with the
development of the search engine in the last 10 years, the world has seen a dramatic shift:
virtually every person on the planet is looking for information on the Internet to help
them solve their problems.
This does not obsolete salespeople by any means; however, it changes the role they are
required to play. The work of conveying information and taking orders is accomplished
far more effectively by a web page. Further, salespeople can no longer find enough
business on their own through prospecting, making cold calls, or traditional territory
planning.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 9 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The work of contacting and sifting through great numbers of prospects to find the ones
ready to buy is accomplished more effectively by a campaign similar to the Johnson
Controls ad campaign described above. Prospects want to research their problems and
your potential to help them via the Internet rather than talk to salespeople, who might try
to twist their arm before they are ready to buy.
When the prospect is ready to talk to a salesperson, they want that person to be able to
offer knowledge and insight tailored specifically for them. The Internet and search
engines cause the scope of activities required for customer relationships to exceed the
salesperson’s span of control. Salespeople will always remain a critical part of what the
customer needs to help them solve their problems, but salespeople cannot do the entire
job alone.
That means that companies must organize and manage groups of people to accomplish
the task salespeople used to do on their own. And that means they require a management
system that clearly distinguishes value add from waste in sales and marketing.
Salesmanship is a Science
Unfortunately, the management system most companies and salespeople live with is not
designed around the principles of salesmanship, much less the principles of the scientific
method. As a result, senior leaders find themselves literally “up a creek.” Their sales and
marketing information systems cannot accurately project revenues or identify waste, and
they have no paddle with which to move in the right direction.
Salesmanship is a science – the science of getting your customers to act so they can be
happier and more productive. Companies need a management system that enables
everyone to know whether their actions are accomplishing the goal, or detracting from it.
Just as in lean process excellence, sales process excellence means everything you do to
find, win, and keep customers must create value for them. Value for the customer is
created when customers take actions.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 10 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
You can start now, today in your company, by getting your marketers and sellers together
to define the stages your customers go through (it is called the customer’s journey). Get
them to clarify observable customer actions and attributes. Start measuring the flow and
the characteristics of customer inquiries, opportunities, and deals, as if they were assets
like inventory, because that is what they are.
It doesn’t matter whether individuals are in the sales department, or the marketing
department, or the service department. What matters is that your team succeeds at
increasing the flow of customers.
Corporate salesmanship is in the simplicity and clarity of the steps you want customers to
take and the effectiveness of how you encourage them to act. The science is in tracking
the information you need to know about their actions, which means: measuring their
responses. What responses? The potential list is immense:
• Market-perceived value (a kind of survey)
• Opt-ins
• Webinar attendance
• Salesperson’s qualification scores
• Customer’s assessment scores
• Number of times you say “No,” or “I don’t know,” to them
• Service requests
• Satisfaction surveys
• Referrals
• “Net Promoter” scores
• Anything else that provides evidence of customer actions
Which data is most important? How do you know what it means? What should you do
with the data? All these are the province of the quality and productivity sciences.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 11 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Once you have measures like the ones listed above associated with the sequence of the
customer’s steps along their journey, you have the makings of a production system as
predictable as any other. Applying the quality and productivity sciences will make more
money for you and your company very quickly.
For example, a software company developed a detailed assessment for measuring
observable characteristics they believed were associated with deals that would close.
After gathering this data from a large enough number of sales opportunities, a statistical
analysis revealed startling insights about their sales process. Knowing which of their
assumptions were right and which ones weren’t enabled them to develop forecast
indicators that have been more than 90% accurate for several years. (Of course, forecast
accuracy has a huge ripple effect on working capital, and accurate forecasts make lean
manufacturing much easier to achieve.)
Another company was frustrated that so few leads from their website resulted in closed
business. Since their website had been designed around their products instead of any
customer purpose, they realized there was no way to know why prospects were visiting,
or what they wanted. When they recast the website to address customer interests, they
learned how to separate real prospects from everyone else, including tire kickers,
students, and existing users. They reduced the quantity of leads to their call center by
more than half, but the quality increased a like amount. The result was a 20% increase in
revenue and a 46% increase in profit.
Finally, a company president was unhappy that his sales force seemed unwilling to follow
the process that had been laid out for them. They towed the line when he was inspecting
their behaviors, but seemed to fall back on old habits when he wasn’t around. We learned
that the process had been defined around very aggressive ideas about what salespeople
should do to follow up with customers, virtually hounding them to take a demonstration
and then to buy. Of course, customers resisted this kind of behavior.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 12 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
When the sales process was redesigned to appeal to what customers wanted, providing
salespeople with appropriate information customers needed at the stages of their buying
cycle, and not trying to force customers to do what they were not ready to do, things got a
lot better.
If you design the sales process so customers will follow it, salespeople will follow it too.
Further, they have less need to protect themselves or hide critical information.
Conclusion: Good Salesmanship Makes More Money
Salespeople played critical roles in each of the above examples. Yet companies cannot
achieve their revenue objectives by relying on the sales department alone. The whole
company must unite in a common view of
• the stages customers go through
• what we do to get them to do what we want
• the data that proves whether they did it or not
For years people have wondered why revenue-generating organizations are so immune to
improvement, why they can’t be managed, measured, and improved like manufacturing
processes have been. The reason is that people have unwittingly assumed that the sales
process is something salespeople do, when in fact it is something their entire company
should be doing, and hasn’t been.
A proper view of the sales process crystallizes what adds value and what doesn’t,
whether it is a headline for an ad campaign, an adroit sales presentation, or an insightful
service call.
If it gets the customer to take the actions we want them to take, it makes money and is
great salesmanship.
How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?
Page 13 Copyright © 2009 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
About the Author
Michael J. Webb, president and founder of Sales Performance Consultants, is the
foremost expert on sales process improvement. Michael has helped business executives
of Fortune 500 as well as tiny start-ups to improve sales and marketing results by
eliminating waste and making the sales funnel flow faster. His website,
www.salesperformance.com supports the Sales Performance Improvement Forum, a
professional educational society for the advancement of sales process improvement.
Michael delivered the keynote address to the first two conferences ever held on applying
Six Sigma to marketing and sales. He has helped companies such as MAQUET, Thermo
Fisher Scientific, Marriott, WaterFurnace, DDI, and many others to identify bottlenecks,
change behaviors, increase close ratios, and improve forecast accuracy. He also has
extensive sales training facilitation and field coaching experience with hundreds of sales
people and managers in the U.S. and Canada.
Michael is the author of “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way” (Kaplan, 2006) and
numerous articles. He has held professional certifications with APICS, and ASQ, and has
a BS in Mathematics from Southeast Missouri State University.