With the rapid change and disrupting influence of the recent financial implosion on the marketplace, increasing sales is often a top of mind solution to decreasing revenues. Understanding how to create more sales is often found by understanding what type of sales organization you now have versus the one that will be effective to meet your sales objectives. Expecting your existing sales efforts to change by edict will only create frustration within your organization.
The majority of sales people are really service providers and fit into the ‘farmer’ category. These organizations expect their sales people to ‘plant seeds’ (by following up on leads or an internal order system), cultivate ongoing relationships by ‘weeding and watering’ their existing clients, with the expectation of ‘harvesting’ sales in the future. These organizations usually rely on ‘push’ marketing activities to 3rd party vendors or direct purchasers.
The second sales organization category is ‘herders’ or ranchers. These salespeople continually move their existing customers to new and improved products and services. Retail sales people have their customers ‘herded’ into their stores by ‘pull’ marketing activities that offer inventory and incentives to buy now.
The third category is what is needed in this economy, the hunters. These sales people are always on the ‘hunt’ to find new customers, ways to get existing customers to buy more, and/or innovative new products and or services to leverage their influence in new markets. Hunters rely on a variety of prospecting methods including cold calling to search for ‘game’. They also rely on ‘baiting’ methods to get their quarry to respond and often resort to ‘ambush’ techniques when the game ‘comes to water’.
Expecting farmers or herders to become hunters just because the market place changes is leadership naivety, especially when compensation and structure has been created to reinforce the system they have been rewarded for in the past. This would be like taking your plow horse to the races and expecting them to win. Conversely, racehorses cannot be expected to plow the south forty. (As a side note – race horses are often the hardest to control – they bite, kick, and often do not play well with other horses). Hunters often have a special mindset and often enjoy the ‘kill’ as much as the reward for bringing in the business. They are the warriors in the business world and are the most challenging of sales forces to manage. But, we need them now more than ever and a great project for seniors is creating more hunters without disrupting your existing business. Winning in the market place requires the best sales and marketing organization and figuring all this out is great food for thought. Enjoy the path.
GMO