Business people in the UK 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. But nowadays we 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 organisation that intends to survive in the re-engineered environment, which arrived with the new millennium must, in my view, respond to those realities and recognise that there is not one critical sales related challenge which must be addressed but five and I will discuss these in a follow up post.

During a recent Top SalesExperts Roundtable discussion, I was asked the question: “Will professional selling ever be the same again?“ 

I responded: “No, of course it won’t for all the reasons we have discussed tonight.

It’s an old but accurate cliché – everything changes – nothing stays the same etc.

In my view, professional selling, and the key word there is professional, is about to take on a whole new image.

All of the dead and inefficient wood is being removed, and what we are going to be left with, will look a whole lot better.

As customers become smarter, more discerning, more knowledgeable and more self-sufficient, we will see a new breed of salesperson develop.

The order takers and glib talkers will no longer have a place in our sales world and in their place will come intelligent strategic orchestrators and business advisors looking to develop long term allies. They will use leading edge technology and they will succeed because they expect to. There is no turning back now.”

In Summary:

Our commercial functions, particularly the sales team, represent our forward line, (offence) and 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.

Today’s News: You have precisely six more days to register your vote in the “Top Sales Article Of The Month”  so please don’t waste it – Kelley Robertson has built up a healthy lead, but will our expert panel agree with the public? Simply click on the banner below to vote.

You need to know that we now have a Top Sales Experts Public Group over at LinkedIn, where most of the TSE team are “residents” It is a very lively location, with lots of really good debate, and last week alone, thirty new members signed up. If you would also like to come and join us, here is the link

Tomorrow: I recently passed 500 (533) blog posts – that takes some doing! But tomorrow we hear from a good friend who has just made his century of posts, and the lessons he has learned. It’s funny, quirky and spot on – only here on the JF Guest Author Spot

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