Whose fault is it really?
I sit across from a certain member of the management team in my company. Every day she receives a number of cold calls.
Here’s a summary of one from this morning (and you don’t even need to hear the salesperson to know exactly what’s going on.)
“Good morning, (company name)”
(sales person speaks)
“Well, we run our own databases inhouse.”
(sales person speaks)
“Err, OK, my email address is….”
So the sales person was obviously leading with the product, had failed to do even basic research (the company I work for is a leader with respect to databases in a specific industry) and had then given up and decided to fill up the manager’s inbox with more rubbish. Conclusion? This is a bad sales person… or, maybe not.
I think, most likely, this is a newish sales person doing what they have been told and encouraged to do (I think this because anyone operating in this way for many years is very unlikely to hit any remotely ambitious target for sometime and would be looking for a new career pretty sharpish). Why has this newbie been told to employ such hopeless tactics?
Anyone who has been on the front line in the last 5 – 10 years knows that the market has moved dramatically over that period and so therefore have the methods sales people need to employ to make sales. The issue is that management’s sales experience (if they have any at all) often comes from the days when such cold calling methods still reaped rewards. Worse still, if they don’t have direct experience, then the activity they demand from their team derives from stereotypes and assumptions, e.g. “Never give up!”, “Never take no for an answer!”, “You’ve got to have the gift of the gab!”, “It’s a numbers game!”, etc, etc.
What I am saying is that poor management – rather than the sales person themselves – is likely to have been the cause of this pitiful cold call.
In the case of this particular cold call, this failing of management might be the downfall of a potentially great sales person. It’s not only wrong in that it’s poor sales practice, it’s wrong for that individual sales person who will pay a high emotional price from the failure that he or she will after a long and unpleasant period of cold calling, eventually experience.
Tags: management, sales management
