Sales jobs art or science

After I graduated my first ever sales job was selling in insurance for Pearl Assurance, as they were known in those days. I started at the same time as another chap called Paul, aged 21. On face value, Paul was utterly ‘normal’ with no experience of sales jobs, arriving from a job behind the counter in the bank which he had done since school, for £8000 per year (the early 1990s). As I was to discover, his sales performance was not normal, but why?

We both went on the same training course learning a mixture of specific product knowledge along with sales skills and techniques. The course was awash with now familiar clichés on sales courses such as, “every ‘no’ is one step closer to a yes”. At the time I was baffled by such phrases, and after applying considerable thought surmised that the act on one person saying ‘no’ in fact had no direct relationship with the next one saying ‘yes’. In practise the phrase is simply reference to statistics. Somewhere there is a statistic of the number of doors knocked in order to get a ‘yes’ and from this perspective, every no is indeed a little closer to a yes.

Another classic cliché from sales managers was “always ask for the business”. This too was a baffler as in some circumstances it clearly wasn’t appropriate, yet they were resolute that you should ‘always’ as for the business.

Our sales course ended and we returned to our areas to go out into the field and begin selling. As I expected, I did well. I hit all my targets and earned £24K in my first year, not bad at 22 in 1991. So what about Paul, an utterly ‘normal’ chap coming from a ‘normal’ job, if anything a little quiet, even a bit boring, bit younger than me with less life experience. His earnings in his first year were £72K!

Now I was really baffled. I was a gregarious, people loving outspoken and competitive graduate with all the qualities you may instinctively expect of budding a salesman. I had worked hard and indeed applied every ounce of intellectual matter to the role to work out how to do it best. It was this latter point turned out to be the telling point!

Determined to learn and do better I swallowed my pride and cornered Paul in the office and asked what it was he’d been doing to sell so much and earn so much in his first year. He simply looked at me and said “dunno really, I just followed everything they said on the course”! In all my attempts to apply rational thought to the processes I had been taught I had began find shortcuts based upon my own ‘relatively’ limited experience and replaced the training course’s approach, which was of course based upon extensive experience. The result, a £52K difference in earnings!!

One prime example of the problem was the mantra “make no assumptions, knock ‘every’ door”. Once out in the field I soon started trying to build up patterns from which assumptions could be made and short cuts could be derived. But it just doesn’t work, one quickly starts making sweeping assumptions that limit opportunity. These assumptions are based on too little information and ultimately may be wrong. Run down houses may often not have lots of spare cash to invest, however, some may house an elderly people with £1000s under a mattress they are looking to invest, until your knock, you really don’t know. In practise, knocking a door and getting ‘no’ is actually pretty quick, so I was merrily discarding opportunities for the saving of maybe 50 seconds!!

To try and define jobs in sales as either art or science is probably simplifying it too much. However, in my experience as a sales manager, many a capable sales representative fails through lack of discipline in following a good sales process. In most of these cases, this occurs when the salesman becomes too cerebral over the task, seeking out patterns to derive short cuts from, but ultimately limiting opportunity. As the case of Paul demonstrates, you really don’t have to be the stereo typical outgoing socialite to do well in sales jobs. The impact of being thorough, and consistently following a good sales process will far outweighs the benefits of charisma and personality type.