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Sales Process: The New Oat Bran
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Sales Process: The New Oat Bran

By: Derek Gatehouse

Mark is a colleague of mine. He sells software. Actually, he sells a lot of

software. Mark has been the top salesman at his company since I first met him

six years ago.

Mark is 45 years old and has never had any sales training whatsoever-don't

even mention it to him; he'll go on a rant. Until his accidental segue into

the sales world in 2001, Mark had been a teacher in the public school system

for some 15 years. Within six months at his software sales job Mark was

consistently selling four to six times more than the salespeople around him.

I can sit and tell stories of the Marks I've met in most every industry you

can name, and I can tell you what the common denominator of every one of

these ultra top producers is, but today let me tell you what it is not. It

is not a sales "process".

I'm not trying to be a naysayer, but to do my job properly I have to tell

folks not only what does work in sales force productivity-I have to comment

on the "fads" when they begin to influence a critical mass, and process has

officially reached fad status. Process is the new oat bran. Ten years ago oat

bran was the cure-all of the day; you couldn't buy anything that didn't boast,

"Now with more oat bran!" on its label. Where's oat bran today?

Let me be blunt. Adopting a company-wide selling process will not raise your

team's performance to stellar levels and it is the Marks of the sales world

who, every day in every sale type, blatantly make the point for us all to see.

No sales training, no formal process-but six times more sales than everyone

else. And if you try to teach Mark a selling process-of just about any kind-

not only will his performance not go up, it will likely go down.

Understand that processes only come into being when there is lagging

performance. No one ever created a process for doing a thing when that thing

was already being done at consistently high levels by all of its

practitioners. A process is conceived only when the "all" part of that last

sentence disappears, and when the process creator believes that the way to

address the issue is by teaching everyone a "proven" series of steps.
But here's the whole kicker. When you study top sales performers you will

quickly see that they all reach those top levels via very different selling

styles! So how do you know who to base your sales process on? Process-izing

only makes sense if it chronicles the one proven best way of doing something,

which you will never find in sales. This is the fundamental flaw of sales

process.

Today's top sales teams have returned to a more human mindset of hiring

talented people and then allowing them-actually encouraging them-to exploit

each of their own styles; to do things their own way rather than overriding

those natural talents with a rigid common process that must be used by

everyone. This first requires a very clear definition of which natural

talents are needed for their specific sale type, but at least that can be

identified.

A process-driven sales forces make me think of a professional football team

spending great time and resources to hire the five best quarterbacks in the

world-who all have their own unique style that they have honed over many

years and that works for them-only to then retrain all five to do things one

common way. We know that in such a case, overall productivity will drop.

Process has its place, but where human performance is concerned there is

rarely one best way to do something. Every time you think there is-every

single time-someone will come along and shatter all previous records by doing

things his own way, thus rendering that superior process of yours moot.

Stop entrusting your salespeople's performance to a process that someone else

says is best. Return instead to what sales has always been about; everyone's

natural born ability to influence and lead others to decision, each in their

own way.

Article Source: http://articlenexus.com

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