Sunday Posts

Sales seems to be a hateful career, if you go by the daily pleadings of the desperate salesmen that we are subject to everyday. However, nothing moves other than sales, people need to be persuaded, nudged or educated to try out anything new or give up something harmful, and indeed, as Daniel Pink contends, that while the 'sales' is dead, everyone has to sell these days. I meet a lot of young unemployed graduates who want a 'desk job', which essentially means that they want a process-based job and don't want to have anything with sales. I would usually tell them that this is a mistake, as process-based jobs, a direct casualty of office automation, are somewhat in short supply. And, that, sales does not have to be the desperate, short term sales jobs that is our usual image of such a profession. Today's salesman is strategic, knowledgeable, often an expert and often an entrepreneur. The people who have to do most sales are those who believe in something, the...

When I picked up this book from the Library shelf, it was Dan Pink's name, whose books on Future Work and Motivation I have read before, that made me do it. I was expecting to read a book on sales: Not that I wanted to, but I must admit that I was intrigued by the literary interest in sales (Philip Delves Broughton's Life's A Pitch appeared around the time this book was published), just as the profession seemed to be dying (see some data here ).  What the book turned out to be is more than I bargained for: This turned out to be a book about persuasion, starting out with a proposition that as sales is dying, we are now all in sales. 'Non-sales Sales', Mr Pink uses the term, is all about the job of persuasion that sits at the heart of almost all the jobs that we are doing now. He cites three main trends - entrepreneurship (that we are all business owners now, either running small businesses, or being self employed), elasticity (that almost all jobs today nee...

Salesmanship is one of the world's most universally derided profession, because most people can not sell. It could have easily be most envied. But everyone is a buyer by definition and in the zero-sum game of life, buyers must win. So, we hate the salesman. On the other side of the fence, salesmen love being hated, as long as rest of world keeps buying from them. I must also add, saleswomen, increasingly. Because the trigger of this post comes from a friend, who just jubilantly informed me what a thrill it was getting her first big order through. She was hating every moment of her sales life. All that hitting the street and making cold calls, hanging around in office receptions, getting by with middle-aged purchase officers who show little sympathy or understanding were wearing her down. It was courageous on her part to take the job in the first place - normally girls would take a 'desk job', an 'administration' job whatever it means. But the realities of the sales...

While I am on the subject of Leadership Training, I had this interesting discussion about sales training in India with a friend. He was emphasizing the need of developing sales training modules specifically for India, and not rehashing the western modules available off the shelf. He also made the point that sales has a changing priority in India, because the new commercial frontiers are the villages and hitherto untouched customers for most industries. His point was - and he had been doing this for more than a decade - that the western models, if it ever worked in India, are losing their effectiveness in the context of this new marketplace. Indian trainers, indeed, covet the western practises. This is primarily based on, I believe, the faith on the superiority of Western business culture. After all, modern business culture in India is deeply influenced by Western business thinking, passed on through customer interfaces and expectations, or through consultants and executives trained in ...

Everyone seems to agree that we live in the era of great change. Everything around us is changing - as textbooks say - and every manager worth his/her salt knows this. But, there are certain areas, this belief in change does not reach. One such area is sales, though this is the most customer-facing of all business functions and where the impact of market change is the greatest. Let me explain. The businesses try to handle change with a great inward focus. The thought is something like, Change is more IT; Change is Diversity in workplace, modern reward management and miscellaneous improvement in HR; change is also the way the board meets over video conference. All such things are change. But, ask a CEO what change means for the sales team, he would normally only say that we live in a more competitive world, but will assert that his/her salespeople are completely geared up: After all, why are you in sales if you are not competitive. The problem is that the changes facing the sales funct...