Part one of this series presented several threats to the sales professional and sales process and three potential web strategies to minimize these threats. This article covers in more detail the threat of disintermediation and how a web strategy impacts your selling efforts.

Consider again, this statistic from part one…

“59% of companies online say cutting out the middleman is a benefit” – By Business Week/Harris Poll

Are your customers and prospects part of the 59%? Is your industry or company a middle player?

Disintermediation happens when customers discover a way to obtain the same services or products through bypassing a middle player and going direct to a provider. Bypassing a middle player typically saves the customer money…the assumption is that one can at least save the middle’s commission let alone other costs that are added through the process.
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Consider the following statistic.

59% of companies online say cutting out the middleman is a benefit -by
Business Week/Harris Poll

Are your customers and prospects part of the 59%? How does this affect your industry? Your company?

As a sales person, are you at risk of having your role dramatically altered because your industry or company isn’t proactive and lacks a strategy? Do your customers and prospects view you as part of the “middle” or an integral part of the process?

You’ve probably seen articles with clever spins on Arthur Miller’s classic play Death of a Salesman and other fatal predictions for the sales profession. In the just sell sales mine we featured an article on kiosks that are designed to replace certain functions of salespeople on the floor and leave them with nothing to do but sell add-on services (e.g., extended warranties) or handle price negotiations. Not a great position for the sales person to be in when the prospect’s relationship is with the kiosk and not the sales professional. There have been articles about the rebirth of the salesperson, assuming, of course, that the passing on has already occurred.
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7. Establishing Efficient Work groups

What procedures are involved in establishing efficient work groups? To be efficient, work groups should be no larger than 10 sales professionals and are best managed with six or less. A manager or senior level person should appoint a Team Lead for the work group. It is the manager’s responsibility to set the initial goals of the work group and convey those goals to the Team Lead.

Management Set Goals Example:

The goals of the work group are:

• Grow total new accounts within the work group by 10% over the next twelve months.
• Increase revenue by 20% over the next 12 months.
• Have a meeting twice a month to discuss new product launches and to share ideas. Each person should bring to the meeting his/her top 10 list. The list shall contain the10 most probable accounts to close over the next 30 days. The meeting is geared toward helping each participant close these ten accounts.
• Discuss any issues of concern individuals may have, keeping negativity brief.
• Create a once a week success email: each participant of the work group needs to share a success story each week on a pre-designated day agreed upon by the group.

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When people hear or see the words Reverse Selling they immediately smile out of curiosity and say “That’s intriguing, what is it?” I usually respond with “Well, if you had to take a guess what would you think it is?” Then, they usually say with a smile “Maybe I’d suggest to a prospective client that they may not be interested in my product.”

That answer, as counter-intuitive as it may sound is only but a brief glimpse into the world of Reverse Selling. The Reverse Selling philosophy espouses the idea of not “chasing” prospective clients, because pursuance and enthusiasm creates pressure. which causes prospective clients to retreat. Instead, it advocates relief of sales pressure by awareness of activities that cause it.
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You do? Good, because there’s a hell of a lot of it coming up. I’ve been rather smug in the past in considering the sales profession a very safe and secure place to be. My thinking went that there will always be stuff to be sold, whether it’s products, services or ideas. That side of the buying/selling equation will stay near enough the same (aside from the shift that has already happened from sale people to internet based sales for commodity goods). On the whole, the changes have been and will be in the market side – what buyers are doing.
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You’re an artist! A professional! What would you need a cheat sheet for? Personally, I couldn’t live without them. By my desk I always have a cheat sheet for each of the three types of prospects I get contacting me. On that sheet are the top 3-5 questions I should ask, along with the key relevant facts about the service I sell. Plus, there are reminders about the boring stuff, “Name, phone, email!”.
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Change the dictionary definition of “Sell” – leave a comment, pass the word on

I’m passionate about the sales profession and I am ready to take action against anything that supports the negative stereotypes about sales people.

Take the following Concise Oxford English Dictionary definition of “sell” (edited to include just the directly relevant points) :

verb 1 hand over in exchange for money. 3 (of goods) attain sales. 6 persuade someone of the merits of.
Their definition barely touches on what selling as a profession – your profession – actually is. Consider the following;
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What would you do in this situation?

There’s a story in sales job hunting folklore where the smugly smiling interviewer plucks out a pen from his jacket pocket and say, “Sell me this pen”. What would you say? Here are the options I came up with:

• Wind up the interview and walk out (on the basis that if you get the job you will be working for crappy management with an old school approach)
• Sell it “consultatively” – Establish their situation, identify pains, etc (“How do you currently record information? How would you like to change your current situation if you could?” etc ). This could be an exceptionally difficult sell… it’s likely to be a highly undifferentiated product and if the interviewer decides to make life difficult for you are really in trouble!

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(Read “Part 1 of 2 : Sales has an image problem” first!)

Today’s sales professional should be proud to be an important, highly-skilled value creator.

Sales’ current PR problem stems from stereotypes that were formed before “consultative” sales methods were introduced when, on the whole, sales really was a predatory, combatitive, money grabbing, win/lose affair.

Sales professionals as value creators
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Negative views of the sales profession cause damage to companies, economies and individuals.

“So, what do you do?”

“I’m in sales,” you reply.

“Ohh…” they say, looking slightly uncomfortable. “What is it you really want to do?”

We’ve all heard this before, or something very close to it. I wrote an article for the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management’s print magazine Winning Edge about this very subject. Here’s a cut down web version:

A Major Role

Sales has an image problem. James Hammersley, the CEO of sales consultancy Win recently told me that, when visiting his old university to give a speech on selling, he asked the audience to describe the defining traits of a salesperson. The responses included ‘sleazy’, ‘untrustworthy’ and even ‘alcoholic’!
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