I would like to compare Sales to Kung-fu – the martial art form from China. You can learn about it in a few days/weeks, but you spend a lifetime to perfect it through practice.
It is sad that in India, the ways we think and act on sales function is pretty neolithic. Which means that usage of old methods is rampant and I guess most of it has come across generations of sales guys who have not had the environment or the challenges to do anything differently.
Organizations haven’t done anything good towards this as well. Whats the use? As a CEO, I got someone to work his buttocks-off, drained everything out of that guy, and then let him drown under the sea of negligence. For many organizations, sales reps are like expended-bullets. Good when they hit targets, and useless after that.
Companies design variable pay structures to lure these sales reps onto committing themselves to targets and then quickly push them into the cat-mouse chase. Forget about anything to do with nurturing the next revolutions in sales, or motivating these guys to look for answers to critical sales questions. For most part of their lives, these sales guys are always chasing numbers – that’s it.
In most of the interviews that I have been taking for Sales, I have come across one major issue – absolute absence of any curiosity throughout their sales career and no past record of any drive to achieve more than their targets. The trouble with this set of people is that – the moment you give them an open chance to define what they can possible achieve, they will end up failing miserably. This will happen both in terms of setting what to achieve, and understanding the best ways possible currently to achieve them.
Reading sales books or books that attempt to explain sales, complex sales, and other tools of accelerating sales performance is not a bad idea. The problem with these books is that they define these interventions based on certain premises which again are based on trends in buying patterns and behaviors in certain companies, countries, continents, etc. Also, these excellent pieces of research is primarily based on external factors that will beg revision before blindly implementing them onto a sales team.
The major challenges therefore, as a sales leader, would be to find answers for the following:
Q. When will we find sales personnel who will have the competence, drive and the curiosity to measure up to the challenges of today’s global business networks.
Q. How will future sales teams look like and how will they function?
Q. How will we design compensation structures for these future sales reps?
Q. How will we figure out the progress of these sales reps without being intrusive?
Q. How will sales teams become an intrinsic part of an organization’s strategic planning sessions?
I am waiting to talk to some young sales talent who would have attempted to answer these questions.