Chapter 1

Defining the Sales Profession

Give us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for—because unless we stand for something we shall fall for anything.

—Peter Marshall

The ultimate goal of any reader of this book is to improve sales team performance in his or her organization. To do that, we must proceed with a shared understanding of the context in which change is to be effected. That context is created by several major elements:

• the evolution of professional selling as a system that involves multiple processes and participants
• trends and drivers in global business and in sales that have had enormous impact on professional selling
• the need for sales training and development to keep pace with change and equip sales team members to be successful in their jobs
• the fact that sales training is often occasional at best in many organizations—a responsibility shared among many people and owned by none.

In this chapter, we review these elements and set the stage for an entirely new approach to sales training and development—an approach that stems from a new competency model designed for all members of the sales profession and that clearly spells out what sales team members need to know and be able to do at work, depending on the role they are playing at the time.

A World Buffeted by Trends

Technological advances over the past two decades have shrunk our world, creating a global economy that is rich in information. This new, smaller world has changed the relationship between buyer and seller permanently; consequently, salespeople have had to adapt. Empowered, informed buyers require innovative approaches to reach them. Salespeople have invented such new techniques as category management, buyer facilitation, and team selling. In a classic snowball effect, these new techniques have created the need for new and expanded knowledge, skills, and abilities on the part of the salesperson. Therefore, global market development trends have powerful implications for salespeople, the sales profession itself, and for sales organizations.

The ASTD 2008 World-Class Sales Competency Study team identified five major trends driving change in the sales profession. These trends and their implications were identified through extensive research that included

• interviews and focus groups with more than 250 thought leaders and practitioners in sales training and development (see Appendix F for a partial list of interviewees and focus group attendees)
• a review of numerous studies, surveys, and articles related to trends affecting the sales profession
• survey responses from more than 2,000 salespeople, sales trainers, and sales managers.

Trends Shaping the Sales Profession

1. Globalization

Every day, more companies are developing strategies to distribute their products or services to new customers, in new industries, and in more locations. Salespeople are often the front line of a company’s presence in a new country, but can face potential language, cultural, and geographic challenges that require specialized knowledge to overcome. These dynamics increase the level of teaming necessary to create the right solution to meet customer demands. These teaming requirements can strain communications and information flow across departmental boundaries and slow down the solution definition process that leads to the creation of powerful customer presentations. Understanding logistical implications as well as cultural differences within the buyer-seller relationship poses a unique challenge to sales success and is critical to sustaining long-term relationships.

2. Competition

As organizations seek to expand, intense and often brutal competition can be a fact of business life. Historically, strategy development was typically the purview of the marketing function, and execution was the responsibility of the sales team. Today, savvy sales managers have come to realize that success will not come in a strategic void. Selling is volatile and changing; a hierarchical approach to planning and execution does not meet the requirements for agility in a churning sales landscape. To meet revenue goals while penetrating customer organizations and maintaining solid customer relationships, frontline sales managers must be empowered to make decisions, maintain momentum in the sales process, and acquire the right resources in support of the sale. Sales teams must have (and sales trainers must develop) strategy-building capabilities to cultivate customer-centered relationships and create adept responses to opportunities, requirement changes, and competitive threats as they emerge.

3. Technology

To stay competitive, organizations must increase their ability to create and disseminate knowledge, yet workers’ ability to process and retain enormous amounts of information has been stretched to the limit. For salespeople, these natural human limitations can strain the buyer-seller relationship. The field of professional selling has attempted to leverage technology to make up for those normal human limitations and to facilitate the buying-selling process.

Salespeople are no longer the gatekeepers of information about products and services. Buyers pursue their own early education, which forces salespeople to enter the process later. As a result, salespeople have fewer opportunities to define customer needs or answer questions about client specifications and business goals. It is more difficult for organizations to build customer loyalty by leveraging a personal approach in the sales process, requiring sales teams to be more exact and precise after the buyer does engage. This smaller margin for error demands the increased sophistication of sales-team technology, which salespeople must become skilled at using. Handheld devices, mobile computing, instant messaging, and social networking have revolutionized how salespeople navigate the sales processes.

Technological advances have created new venues and channels for selling. For example, the “click to talk live” feature of many websites blends customer service with telesales in a call-center environment. Selling is also becoming the responsibility of nontraditional sales roles, and companies are cross-training installation, service, product-development, and other staff in sales techniques.

 

4. Demographics

Sales managers must balance the tension of building a culture of teamwork with the need for increased levels of praise and feedback for individual achievement. Compounding the difficulty of these changes is the desire of younger employees who are seeking, and even demanding, to relate to their leaders as peers.

—Tim Ohai, president, Growth & Associates

For the first time in history, sales managers may find themselves managing members of three or four distinct generations in the workplace. In industrialized markets, these diverse workers bring differing approaches to their work, their learning, and the ways in which they respond to management and hierarchy. While many older workers prefer to work independently, younger workers place value on collaboration and enjoy working in teams. While older workers respect tenure and experience, younger workers expect a flatter organization and a say in their work and how they approach it. These differences call for adjustments on both organizational and personal levels.

Organizationally, managers must strive to build a less rigid, nonhierarchical environment within the sales organization that encourages independence and shared authority. Sales managers must balance building a team culture with the need for individual recognition.

Younger employees seek, and even demand, to relate to their leaders as peers. They are forcing changes within the sales team, causing a ripple effect in talent management, leadership development, and organizational performance strategies. On a personal level, sales managers must be willing to let go of what has made them successful in previous years and embrace what will make them successful in the years to come.

The United States and many other industrialized nations are also facing the imminent retirement of hundreds of thousands of skilled, knowledgeable workers. Despite the fact that technology has rendered many jobs obsolete, the need for skilled salespeople remains great: In its 2007 Talent Shortage Survey, Manpower discovered—for the second year in a row—that business-to-business sales positions are the hardest to fill in the United States and several other countries. A 2007 survey by CSO Insights revealed that nearly 15 percent of responding organizations planned to increase the size of their sales teams by 21 percent or more (Dickie and Trailer, 2007).

While most other professions can rely on a steady supply of potential employees from high school, college, or workforce-development programs, the sales profession lacks a comparable system to generate new talent. Over the past five years, colleges and universities have begun to offer courses in professional selling, but not nearly enough to meet the need.

Implications: Changes in Buyers’ Expectations

Buyer expectations are rapidly changing. As they become more knowledgeable and informed, they expect the same from salespeople. They expect salespeople to be stakeholders in the success of both organizations and to work as partners to find advantageous business solutions. Increased competition means that buyers have many more choices and can be more discriminating and demanding. Further, the requirements of a rigid bottom line and brutal competition have driven the commoditization of many products.

The buyer-seller relationship contract has irrevocably changed. Here is how:

Increased responsibility for the salesperson. Buyers are demanding more. Higher expectations for attaining business results are being placed on sales professionals by buyers who are expected to make the correct purchase decision.

Buyers are now demanding an understanding of their business, objective interpretation of their needs, and a clearer translation into implementation actions.

—Dave Stein, ES Research Group

Salespeople are under increased pressure to attain the goals of both the selling organization and the buying organization. Salespeople are learning that they must be willing to accept responsibility for ensuring the success of the buyer and the seller, as defined by each party.

Increased emphasis on consultative selling. Salespeople continue to transition from transactional selling to consultative selling, which leverages a true partnership mentality. More firms are striving to become trusted advisors to their customers. As a result, salespeople are focusing on developing deeper relationships and personal networks inside their target companies as well as within the specific industry.

Skills such as listening, analyzing, problem solving, and questioning help buyers navigate the complexity of the solution and the plethora of available information. Communication skills such as active listening can help sellers identify root problems and hidden obstacles that affect the buyer’s business success. Building rapport, demonstrating patience, and exercising astute timing contribute to building the foundation for a trusting buyer-seller relationship.

Increased seller responsiveness. Historically, the role of the sales manager has been to focus on monthly or quarterly results. That environment forces many sales professionals into a commodity selling situation that is more transactional, especially when the end of the month is near. However, in today’s competitive landscape, sales must focus on maintaining professionalism with buyers who may not have the same timeframe in mind or who may have strong negotiating skills. The salesperson must stay focused on delivering value to the buyer based on mutually agreed-upon goals and objectives. This requires taking the client’s best interest into account while providing a relevant solution to the business issues at hand.

Increased emphasis on profitability. Traditionally, sales organizations have focused on volume of individual activity as an indicator of productivity. As such, the sales professional’s compensation came when he or she met or exceeded his or her sales quotas. Now, more firms are examining the profitability and productivity of salesperson activity, rather than frequency or volume.

Organizations are working hard to ensure their sales team members use time appropriately and productively. Sales training and development professionals are uniquely positioned to work with salespeople to help them be productive, profitable, and, ultimately, world class.

Defining the Sales Profession

Profession: An occupation, such as law, medicine, or engineering, that requires considerable training and specialized study.

—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth edition

As we have discussed, the buyer-seller relationship has undergone many changes over time. Salespeople have attempted to rise to the challenge of meeting or exceeding buyer expectations. Often, theirs has been a reactive approach to market, buyer, and technological forces. The same has been true for the development of sales training approaches—reactive, rather than proactive, and they are often outdated by the time they are rolled out.

Further, sales training often takes place in a vacuum. There is no clear professional consensus on the roles salespeople play and the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed in those roles. Salespeople have been left to develop their own unique approaches and, in many cases, to pursue their own training where they can find it.

To become truly competent, salespeople must learn to customize and personalize their approaches based on inputs from buyers. It requires each
salesperson to deliver value to the customer in a uniquely tailored fashion and to define what is expected of a competent professional. But, without a universal framework around which to build that definition, true effectiveness has been elusive.

To lay out what knowledge, skills, and abilities are necessary for the successful salesperson, we must first arrive at a useful definition for the profession itself. This involves setting some boundaries, identifying what lies within the scope of the sales profession and what should remain outside it. To establish those boundaries, the ASTD 2008 World-Class Sales Competency Study team agreed that the successful selling organization involves more people than just those individuals who carry a sales quota—but does not include the entire revenue-generation system required by companies.

No widely accepted definition of professional selling existed at the time our research commenced. The research team realized that it was difficult for
academics, practitioners, consultants, and trainers to move the profession forward in its absence. Therefore, the research team attempted to answer the following questions:

• Who is in the sales profession?
• What do they know that makes them successful?
• What do they do that makes them successful?

To help with these research questions, the team crafted a definition of professional selling that placed the profession within the context of the promotion mix while establishing its boundaries.

To ASTD, the sales profession is

“The occupation required to effectively develop,
manage, enable, and execute a mutually beneficial, interpersonal exchange of goods, services, or solutions for equitable value within the full context of the buying and selling relationship.”

The ramifications of this definition should not be underestimated. This definition not only helps frame the model found within World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies, but also helps the advancement of the sales profession. This definition sets forth that

• selling requires a systems approach to be effective
• the focus of the profession is on the human agents involved in the exchange between customer and seller
• the purpose of the profession is a financial exchange based on value between the buyer and the seller.

This definition has become the foundation upon which the ASTD 2008 World-Class Sales Competency Study was built. With the adoption of this definition, selling should no longer be viewed as an isolated or purely tactical function. Rather, the profession has evolved to include people who perform multiple sales-related roles. These roles include not only people who carry sales quotas, but also those who perform related tasks in the context of a larger, shared performance culture.

The sales profession includes all of the people in an organization who are directly responsible for sales performance, whether they directly sell or support those who do. All of these people are aware of the organization’s business strategy and leverage technology in pursuit of its goals, but they vary in their job duties and measures of success. Together, these individuals work together to accomplish the revenue-acquisition goals of the organization alongside their counterparts in marketing, advertising, public relations, and promotion.

 

People who meet the definition of professional selling typically fall into one of four functional areas: personal selling, sales operations, sales training and development, and sales management:

• Personal selling. People within this function establish a primary personal relationship while generating customer interest; position, qualify, negotiate, and close opportunities; design, communicate, and generate customer enthusiasm for products, services, or solutions. They typically carry a sales quota.
• Sales operations. People within this function influence supporting sales organizations, including task substitution, order entry and
  fulfillment, tool/system development and implementation, sales methodology and process definition and implementation, and
  compensation planning.
• Sales training and development. People within this function design and deliver sales training and development offerings, including curriculum, course, and material development; the evaluation of learner progress; the integration of learning initiatives with sales activity; and the delivery of learning solutions.
• Sales management. People within this function provide strategy and direction to the sales process; manage resources to achieve business, operational, or organizational goals; and direct and manage others.

These four functional areas must work together in a world-class sales organization.

In the Next Chapter

Our new definition of professional selling makes clear who is part of the sales profession and what they do. This understanding helps to determine, then, what those sales professionals need to know and do to be successful. Chapter 2 describes the rise of the sales professional as a knowledge worker, shows how the shift to consultative selling requires new competencies, and demonstrates how the sales process must be aligned to competencies to create a world-class sales organization.