Wired for Sales

I recently had a great conversation with a veteran distributor salesperson who’s considering retiring after nearly six decades in the business. We discussed how sales methods have changed while trading personal stories as well as anecdotal information passed down by previous generations of sellers.

Early changes came about slowly, morphing as existing salespeople were forced to adopt new methods. Some of the shifts took decades to replace, while others happened more quickly. The word evolution came up multiple times and seemed fitting.

Evolution, according to Darwin, is described not as the survival of the most intelligent but as the survival of those most adaptable to change. In the case of distributor selling, some refused to change. No doubt, some sellers rode their old selling patterns to retirement or found themselves in new non-selling roles. There were also those few who adopted new selling strategies and enjoyed the fruits of their shifts.

To illustrate how these shifts took a long time to become apparent, let’s revisit sales wisdom from the 1940s. Enter the Willy Loman approach to selling. Pulling the descriptor from “Death of a Salesman,” the typical sales guy is identified thusly: “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake.”

Skipping forward 30 years and noting the mention of shiny shoes, I recall a portion of my Allen-Bradley sales training featuring an appearance by the corporate receptionist. New trainees listened attentively while she lectured on the importance of having shiny wingtips and replacing run-down heels every few months. For a kid more accustomed to tennis shoes and python boots, the whole thing seemed weird.

When I was a young factory sales engineer circa 1978, most of the distributor salespeople I engaged with were still “wingtipping” their way down the Willy Loman path, plying the customers with gregarious personalities while conversing about the weather and sharing sports stats. None focused on problem solving.

The forces of the recession of 1981-82 changed the customer landscape. Successful sellers were forced to switch to something more powerful – features and benefits selling, not necessarily by choice. Customer contacts suddenly changed, and the sales guys willing to evolve pulled in more business.

Features and benefits selling was the rage of the early ’80s. Matching product features with benefits for the customer drove change. The concept required deeper product knowledge, which wasn’t part of Willy Loman’s personality-based sales scheme. Plus, there were issues. The biggest problem was that benefits often weren’t fully aligned with the customer’s needs. The missing point was the need to understand the customer’s situation and make the benefits closely match the customer’s needs.

Early on, some experienced sellers started understanding their customers’ specific needs. Typically, the salesperson personally built trust with the customer and established a reputation for understanding the application of their products better than other sellers, and sometimes better than the customer. In the early days, the reputation of these salespeople grew as they were asked to participate in customer internal efforts such as Kaizen and continuous improvement events.

Customers perceived the efforts of these sellers as providing value that far outweighed any kind of discount provided by competitors. In the best scenarios, the seller became competition-proof. Features and benefit selling evolved into solution selling. Once again, the environment and the Great Recession of 2008-09 created another need for change.

Feeling the pinch of a global recession, customers launched new efforts to cut costs. For distributors providing solutions, without financial metrics attached, the costs of their services put them at a financial disadvantage. A cloven-hoofed denizen of the purchasing department could take advantage of a seller (and their company) by using valuable information to go out for bid. A new step in the evolutionary process was born.

Solution sellers added a level to their financial expertise. Understanding the value of their services, they affixed fees to services not normally available to customers. We call this evolutionary step value metric solution selling.

Today, being “wired for sales” means getting paid for what you know.