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Introduction
Among the disciplines that make up the field of management, sales rarely gets the respect it deserves. If a business does a perfect job of designing its products and services, the theory goes, who needs salespeople? As Peter Drucker wrote: “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous . . . to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
In fact, as the essays in this collection make clear, selling remains a vital function in the vast majority of companies. Technology has made many products more complicated, creating the need for salespeople to educate consumers on their uses. In the B2B world, the shift to services has created a move away from simple transactional relationships between buyers and sellers; instead, companies need to nurture long-lasting relationships with customers, with salespeople often serving critical roles as stewards of those relationships. Feedback gathered by salespeople can serve as a powerful engine of innovation. And as anyone who’s worked in a corporate setting near the end of a quarter knows, salespeople remain the key to the revenue growth that’s so important to many managers and investors. While there will always be a select group of simple products that “sell themselves,” in many industries, good salespeople remain a big determinant of company performance.
So how do you effectively recruit, train, manage, and support these key employees? How do you use smart pricing, promotions, and incentives to make them more successful? And how should salespeople attack the daily tasks of their profession, from planning a sales call to handling a potential customer’s toughest questions?
These questions—and many more—are addressed in the essays that follow, which began as a series of blog posts on HBR.org, the website of Harvard Business Review.
While both physical and virtual bookstores abound with volumes of sales advice, this collection offers two distinct advantages. First, unlike single-author works, this collection features a variety of viewpoints by writers with diverse expertise. Second, unlike sales advice drawn primarily from hard-won experience, many of these essays draw on rigorous quantitative research into what really works (and what doesn’t), done by researchers at some of the world’s best universities and sales consultancies.
More than most workers, salespeople perform in a field where success is easily judged: How much did you sell today, this week, or this quarter? In that pursuit, we hope that HBR’s authors and the advice in How to Sell More offer valuable tools to drive success.
—THE EDITORS
The Most Important Predictor of Sales Success
By Philip Delves Broughton
Philip Delves Broughton is the author of The Art of the Sale and writes regularly for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Spectator.
No profession in business has a more complex reputation than sales. When we think of salespeople—from Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman to Donald Trump to Steve Jobs—all kinds of contradictory ideas and images jangle in our minds. They can be persuaders and bullies, seducers and rogues, dream-makers and charlatans. But without them, no business exists.
It’s not just salespeople who must sell. Entrepreneurs must persuade others of the value of an idea or company which has yet to take concrete form. CEOs must convince the board, markets, employees, and customers that what they are doing is valuable. Politicians, artists, and scientists all must sell themselves and their work in order to succeed.
Sales is the most human and richly nuanced aspect of business and yet, amazingly, is not even a required course at most business schools. MBA students are dutifully taught finance, strategy, and operations as if revenue appeared by magic and salespeople were at best a necessary evil.
But as one great salesman told me, sales is the greatest laboratory there is for understanding human nature. So while researching my book The Art of the Sale, I set off on a trip to meet salespeople around the world, in different cultures and different fields of selling, to understand not only what they did, but also what went on in their minds as they did it.
I began my journey in a Moroccan souk, an ancient marketplace where people must look each other in the eye over a pile of goods and decide whether to buy or sell, without the cover of email or conference calls. Abdelmajid Rais El Fenni, one of the most successful carpet and rug traders in Tangiers, explained how he coped with the daily rejections and petty humiliations every salesman must face.
“You are like a beggar in sales, asking again and again all day,” he said. “The salesman should have loose robes. You never get upset. Of course, sometimes you have customers and you want to kill them. But you’re not allowed to.”
His ability to brush off the insults and press ahead, to have “loose robes,” enabled him to do what he really enjoyed, which was trading in beautiful objects with people he liked.
Anthony Sullivan, a television infomercial salesman based in Tampa, told me that trying to over-intellectualize selling was a surefire way to fail.
“I have people who work with me who know everything about sales, but they still couldn’t sell,” he said. “They don’t have what it takes. And then I’ve watched kids on YouTube who make fake infomercials and they’re getting millions of views.”
Sullivan has read numerous sales books and attended conferences, but says most provide no more than a brief sugar high. “They get you all fired up, but you fall back into your old ways pretty soon. When you get into a bar fight, you revert to what comes naturally—the old-fashioned tactics.” Your authentic self will always, eventually, come out.
Ashok Vemuri, the head of Americas at Infosys, the Indian business process outsourcing company, made a similar point. The more salespeople he has hired, he said, the less impressed he is with the stereotypes and training which dominate the sales industry. The rigid methods taught in most sales courses, he told me, are hopeless in the field. “It seems everyone has to be either Dirty Harry, or the girl on the beach in her bikini teasing people.” Instead, what he looks for are intelligence, curiosity, and an agile mind. The chest-beating Alpha male of sales myth has no place in this universe. Rather, it is the low-ego character who regards client service as the highest goal who thrives. He is looking for people who can make others comfortable, who are articulate, and who are able to deal with the unexpected.
“I’ve had salespeople with terrible accents, who don’t adhere to an acceptable Westernized dress code, and misspeak words, but they are terrific story-tellers,” he told me. “They relate their story to your problem and can combine experiences across functions and geographies. They cannot hold a great conversation with the CEO about wine, but they can talk specifically about technology.”
Everywhere I went, from Silicon