salesperson
By David Fellman
The Prime Directive for most businesses is to grow the business, and for a printing firm, there are only two ways to do that: gain new customers and/or sell more to your current customers. It’s generally acknowledged to be easier to do the latter, which I think provides evidence that you need someone with special skills and attitudes to do the former. I don’t have any factual data to prove this, but my consulting experience suggests that maybe 10% of all current printing salespeople have well-developed hunter skills and attitudes.
Hunter skills include questioning, listening and negotiating. Hunter attitudes start with a very competitive nature, and a desire to avoid getting bogged down in details. Now, that should scare you, because the definition of a good salesperson for most printers would include being detail-oriented and working well with the production side of the business. You have to understand, though, that you don’t pay a hunter to get orders or to process them, you pay him/her to create a decision—the decision to give your company a chance. A pure hunter will do that, and your company will (hopefully) benefit from the lifetime value of that customer. The (hopefully) part reflects the distinct possibility that it won’t be a long and full lifetime if you expect a real hunter to farm that account too.
Farmers
The hunter/farmer analogy is not as clean as I would like it to be, because it’s based on the idea that hunters kill and farmers grow. A better analogy might be obstetricians and pediatricians; one is responsible for the birth of a relationship and the other is responsible for maintaining its health. The hunter/farmer terminology is pretty well accepted, though, so let’s continue to use it.
Farmer skills include questioning, listening and negotiating, too, but there’s a significant difference in the application of those skills. For the hunter, questioning and listening are essential to finding weaknesses in the status quo, and negotiations are mostly about positioning a higher price as the solution to a problem, or possibly a better way of doing something. For the farmer, questioning and listening are more about getting the specs on every project right, and the justification for a higher price can be tied to proven performance.
Farmer attitudes start with a commitment to customer satisfaction, and that should scare you a little bit too. As I tell salespeople in seminars, a large part of their job is to be the advocate of the customer to the company; in other words, the salesperson communicates the customer’s needs and wants to the company, and fights for the customer’s best interests. At other times, though, the job description shifts, and the salesperson has to be the advocate of the company to the customer; in other words, sometimes the bearer of bad news.
I have never been one who believes in the idea that salespeople should be called something else, because of a stigma attached to the sales profession in our society. I do believe, though, that Account Manager is a very good title for a salesperson whose primary responsibility is customer maintenance rather than new customer development. I think the combination of representing the customer and representing the company is well-defined by the phrase managing the account.
Where do organizational skills fit into all of this? From my perspective, strong organizational skills are a significant asset for a hunter but an absolute necessity for a farmer. To put that another way, I will tolerate some organizational deficiencies in a salesperson with a proven ability to develop new customers. I’ve found that you can’t tolerate the same lack of organization in an Account Manager, though, because the largely reactive nature of the position requires strong organization and prioritization skills.
Missionaries
My dictionary provides several definitions of the word missionary, one of which is: somebody who tries to persuade others to accept or join something. In our industry right now, there’s a pretty significant need/opportunity for missionaries who can sell innovative applications of our capabilities and technologies. From printing on new substrates to what I like to call extreme personalization, 21st Century printing capabilities have opened up vast new possibilities for business communications.
The problem, though, is that these applications don’t sell themselves, so we need salespeople who can sell them. Missionary skills certainly include questioning, listening and negotiating, but they also include an intellectual component that not all hunters have. To put it bluntly, you have to be smart enough to understand both the technical aspects and the communications potential. And then you must have both the patience and the creativity to develop and sell a program, not just a relationship or a product.
Missionary attitudes include that patience, and also a commitment to the concept of return on investment. A true printing missionary is almost always selling something that costs more than the status quo. That means his/her negotiation position will almost always be: "Yes it costs more, but it’ll work better and therefore be a better investment.”
Your Sales Position
The point of all of this, of course, is that the person needs to be matched to the position. If you have a need for a hunter or a missionary, you won’t be happy with the performance of a person with farmer skills and attitudes. So how do you know what skills and attitudes a candidate possesses?
First, all of your recruiting material should stress exactly what you’re looking for. Second, most of your interview and reference check questions should be about confirming these traits. Third, don’t ever hire a salesperson without first testing for the skills and attitudes the position requires.
Will you be attending Graph Expo in October? If so, come to my seminar titled "Sales Management Savvy: How to Hire, Motivate, and Compensate Top Performers" on Monday, October 8 from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM, where I’ll explain all of this is greater detail. I know that you don’t want to make any mistakes with your next new hire, and I think I can also teach you something about how to improve the performance of your current sales team.
Recruiting
OK, it’s time to hire a new salesperson, either to replace one who’s leaving, or to open new territory. How do you find the best candidates? Most printers seem satisfied to place a Help Wanted ad on monster.com, or one of the other online services, or even in the newspaper, but I don’t want you to stop there. I think it’s important to understand the difference between advertising and recruiting. One is mostly passive, the other is highly proactive
I think it’s also important to understand why advertising alone usually fails. The reason is simply that the person you really want to hire is not looking for a job right now!
Two Reasons
Think about this for a moment. There are only two reasons why someone would be looking for a job. One is that there’s something wrong with the job they have, and the only other is that there’s something wrong with the person. Now, there certainly are good people in bad situations out there, including very good people who have become available through layoffs and business failures that were in no way their fault. But I still think it’s fair to say that the majority of job-seekers—especially sales job seekers!—are job-hoppers or poor performers or very possibly both. I think the salesperson you really want to hire is working right now, and performing at a high level right now, and loyal to his/her employer…but smart enough to listen if something potentially better comes along!
How do you reach people like that? One possibility is to hire a search firm, but there’s a significant cost attached to that, and no guarantee of success. A better strategy, I think, is simply to network through your family, friends, suppliers, customers, fellow Rotarians or Chamber members, etc. Describe the opportunity in general terms and the skills and attitudes you’re looking for in specific terms, and ask if they know anyone who might fit the bill. If they do, ask for names and contact info, or give them your contact info to pass along.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t advertise. As noted there are good people in bad situations who are looking on monster.com. The real lesson for today is that advertising alone probably isn’t enough to insure that you’ll find the salesperson you really want.
The Interview
Think back on the last time you interviewed a candidate for a sales position. How good a job did you do? Maybe a better question is how happy have you been with the salesperson you hired?
A job interview has both buying and selling elements to it. I think it’s fair to say that most printers put the cart before the horse in this process, trying to sell the job to the candidate before they’ve decided that they want to buy that candidate’s services. I urge you to focus on the buying side before you spend any significant time trying to sell the job.
My interviewing strategy is pretty straightforward, and it doesn’t include questions like "what did you like about your last job?” or "what did you not like?” I start with a statement—"Here are the skills and attitudes I’m looking for…”—and continue with a challenge: "Convince me that you possess these skills and attitudes!”
I would probably not be as direct if I were interviewing, say, a candidate for a design or production position. A salesperson, though—certainly a hunter or a missionary—should be able to handle this sort of situation. The way I look at it, the interview process is the first element of testing a candidate.
Beyond the challenge element, I have created a list of interview questions that you might find helpful. You can find it at: http://www.davefellman.com/uploads/21_Pretty_Good_Questions.pdf
By the way, I would never hire a salesperson on the strength of a single interview. I make it a point to have at least two face-to-face meetings, and I have talked with some candidates 3-4 more times on the phone. I’m also a very strong believer in having others in my organization talk to each candidate. The better you get to know a candidate before you make a hiring decision, the more likely it is to be a good hiring decision.
Keeping Your Salespeople Happy
Having (hopefully) found yourself a good salesperson through some of the strategies and techniques I’ve been writing about, how do you keep that person with you? It’s pretty simple really. First and foremost, you make sure that your expectations and your salesperson’s expectations are in synch, and then you keep your side of the bargain. (And if your salesperson doesn’t keep his/her side of the bargain, we’re not talking about a good salesperson, right?)
Your expectations start with the job description—developing new customers vs. servicing established customers, quote machine vs. missionary, etc.—and continue with more tangible action standards and objectives. Your overall objective (and the salesperson’s quota) might be $500,000 in sales, and one of the action standards to support that might be 20 "prospecting starts” each week. (That’s my term, by the way, for a process which begins with the identification of "suspect” companies and ends with the qualification of real prospects.)
Your salesperson’s expectations probably start with an income goal, but may also include support and "working conditions” expectations. Let’s deal with those first. Part of your side of the bargain is to ensure that the promises your salesperson has to make are being kept; promises of quality, service, reliability, etc. Now, the salesperson shouldn’t be making unreasonable promises—again, one who does that would not be a good salesperson, right?—but you have to understand that those promises are a critical part of the selling process. If the promises aren’t kept, the customer may not buy from you again, and that effects the salesperson’s income. Put yourself in a salesperson’s shoes. If you do your job—developing customers, winning orders, etc.—but your "promise-keepers” don’t do their job, you’re probably going to look for a better group of promise-keepers before too long.