During today's excellent Top Sales Roundtable - "The Changing Face of Professional Selling" - we discussed the fact that "selling" is still a dirty word. Why?
It is true that business people in the UK - and apparently everywhere else in the world - have devalued selling for far too long and some managers have convinced themselves that they would do better if they did not employ salespeople - after all, good products sell themselves - don't they?
As a consequence, until very recently, salespeople have done everything possible to avoid calling themselves "a salesman or a saleswoman." They have developed a series of euphemisms such as - "Sales Engineer," "Account Executive," "Technical Sales Consultant," etc.
Nowadays we must accept that we all sell everyday - doctors, lawyers, estate agents, architects and politicians. The fact remains that anyone who is in business has to sell themselves and their products - and the so called "Captains of Industry" - Branson, Roddick, Marshall, Hanson, Gates, Dell and Co. are thought the best salespeople in the world.
It therefore follows that the quality and success of our salespeople will ultimately determine the success of our companies. Certainly the world has become more competitive and, in order to survive and stay in business, we need to continually expand and develop the skill sets of our sales team.
Sir John Harvey-Jones said "Most companies fail not in their attempts to be innovative or creative. In this country most of them fail because they undervalue the importance of professional selling."
Unfortunately, the task of selling never becomes any easier and as competition continues to intensify, sales people will face issues that can be extremely difficult to deal with - e.g. decreased product uniqueness, increased competition within 'safe' markets, longer sales cycles and shorter product life spans.
Every organization that intends to survive in the re-engineered environment which arrived after the recent financial meltdown must, in my view, respond to those realities.
In Summary
Our commercial functions, particularly the sales team, represent our forward line - our offense - If they are not scoring regularly, we cannot possibly achieve our overall commercial objectives - i.e. nothing happens until somebody sells something, and all of that investment in costly accounting software, new office equipment, expensive IT systems, etc. will count for nothing.
We can therefore say with complete confidence, that selling really is the key factor in the total marketing process.
I sell; you sell; we sell - everyday. Let's be proud of that?
What do you think?