If the days of the price-based sale are gone, then so too are those of the “ice-to-the-Eskimos” type of salesperson. McCurdy says the high pressure sales approach taken in the 1990s is not appropriate now.
“I was an IT manager in the 1990s and I saw heaps of these guys coming through,” McCurdy says. “You can’t sell in that way any more. Your IT manager these days is more educated -- he is not a programmer who has suddenly become the IT manager. He has business degrees and a finance background. He understands business issues. You have to work with these people, you have to find and understand their pain points.”
“So the barnstorming approach is gone, and it is definitely a relationship-style approach. That drags the sales process on a lot longer, but everybody comes up with a win. The customer gets what they really need, and if the salesperson takes the time to listen, they can come out with a profitable business deal.”
Chandler McLeod’s Dredge believes the notion that there is some inherent quality that makes a person good at sales died 20 years ago.
“That only worked when demand exceeded supply for goods and services,” Dredge says. “What makes for success in sales today is a person’s ability to deal analytically with issues. They have to have the breadth of marketing knowledge and understand the nature and the detail about the demand to which they are responding, and be able to construct a business case from that. And finally, they have to have the ability to communicate that both verbally and in written form.”
DiData’s Tea manages a sales team of 20 in NSW, and says generally that the more seasoned campaigners are able to demonstrate value to a client fairly easily and in more a innovative fashion than their less experienced counterparts. "Some people just have it, and some people don’t,” Tea says.
“The way that people learn to sell value is to learn to understand what the solutions are actually about, what cost benefit people can get out of the solution. So they need to have a reasonably commercial business mind, so that they can look at a P&L [profit and loss statement] and understand what the impact to that customer’s business is. If you have that sort of knowledge, it makes it much easier.”
Tea herself has an accounting background, and says she spends much of her time selling value from a business perspective, in terms of what it will do to their productivity and bottom line.
Most companies are also rewarding their sales people on the basis of profitability, not revenue.
“IT retailing is a competitive business,” says Harvey Norman’s Slack-Smith. “We get competitive quotes from customers daily, and we will turn up and be as competitive as we can inside the shops. And we will never back away from that -- we can’t -- because the customer is the one that is dictating what prices products are sold for. But the company is built around profit, not around sales volumes.”
“Now if we have members of the sales team that are reverting to price and price alone, and that is a consistent trait of the way they are conducing the business inside the store, we would normally look to work with that person, provide extra training and one-on-one coaching.”
Got selling skills?
Understandably, these types of salespeople are not easy to bring across.
Tea says Dimension Data instead often recruits new sales staff in its enterprise area from the various market segments that it is targeting. “Domain expertise is something that we very much need, especially when we are selling things like our managed services portfolios, and we need to understand the outcomes that the customer wants.”
The chief executive of specialist security distributor Firewall Systems, Scott Frew, says selecting a good value-oriented salesperson requires getting a feel for their personality. He says it is less about their formal education, and more about their motivation.
“I typically try and employ guys outside of the industry, because the industry is starting to settle and is not as aggressive as it used to be,” Frew says.
“The last guy I employed came out of industrial plastics, and he has been fantastic. I’m just looking for someone who genuinely wants to look after the customer.”
Lovegrove says that he is looking to double Brennan IT’s sales team to 10, and will be seeking candidates who really have an understanding of solution selling. He has also chosen in the past to hire people who do not have an IT background.
“I’m looking for someone who has some business acumen, when they can have a conversation with the client and understand that business,” Lovegrove says. “Because only if you understand what the client’s needs are, only then can you put together a solution that addresses those needs.”
For Harvey-Norman, Slack-Smith says he looks for good communication skills. “When you have people with both of those traits [business acumen and good communication], you can do something with them. Because when you are in the retail business dealing with people from all walks of life, you’ve got to be able to be flexible and open in the way you approach people."
Slack-Smith says this also leads him to hire people whose expertise lies outside of traditional retailing. He has even hired a professional hairdresser to join the same team. “He had spent the last 10 years talking to people. And he was an outstanding success from the very first work.”
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