Sales- The Bete Noire of the Intelligentsia

I’ve been doing Sales for a while and one thing I realize is that its one of the hardest, the most important yet one of the most under appreciated and less talked about professions. I mean come to India Sales guys are perceived to be proverbial junk. Almost every other news platform or social media is abuzz with stories about ‘Tech Warriors’ , ‘Product Ninjas’, ‘Data Scientists’ or ‘Machine Learning Engineers’ who are changing the world. But you’d hardly find a story or so on a sales guy who in any way is changing the world. If media logic is to be believed even for a second sales guys would perhaps face an existential crisis. Why such indifference? Let us take a few minutes to figure out what the sales profession embodies.

Let us first deal with the definition of what sales for an organizational pyramid stands for. Semantically Sales could be defined as

So essentially any activity that leads to sale of products or services of a company thereby resulting in revenue is termed sales. Most of us don’t have to be Einstein to know how important revenue is for a company. In other words the entire company runs on the revenue generated by the sale of products/services.If that be the case isn’t Sales one of the most important constituents holding a company together.

Doesn’t that lead to a conclusion that sales guys are actually driving the company. Then why is it one of the less talked about and non dignified professions? Or let me put it in another way- why don’t sales guys command as much respect as techies or designers or engineering managers but do get a lot of contempt/flak if sales doesn’t work out? What drives such frivolous behavior. Do we need to consult Stephen Levitt or Naseem Taleb to explain such confirmation biases? or maybe the crowd suffers from cognitive dissonance of epic proportions that despite of empathizing with the fact that sales has always been the primordial life force that has driven many a organizations to their glories.

In fact there are a lot of myths surrounding the profession. Let me dispel them one by one:-

Myth#1- Sales is for losers- Well if sales was for losers why’d you have Steve Jobs or Le Iacocca or Ray Croc do it for a better part of their lives. I mean aren’t these guys the legends who built formidable products and companies and left their legacies behind. In fact it takes a loser to perceive sales guys as losers owing to irrationality or God knows what. Some of the brightest minds across the world were sales guys.

Myth#2- Sales doesn’t require any knowledge or intelligence- Well that’s the dumbest notion I have heard from buffoons across the corporate utopia who can’t seem to swallow the notion that sales does require comprehensive knowledge of the product or the service or the company. It is one of the most knowledge centric professions across the world because it involves aligning yourself to a consumer’s psychology to identify his needs and wants so lack of knowledge doesn’t really help there- and believe me it’s not easy convincing people with half baked knowledge-you get fried in the process. It is a reasonably intelligent job and requires high cognition in real time to incept the idea across a customer journey map.

Myth#3- Sales guys are not the quintessential leaders- To all the hicks who live under the perception that sales guys are not leadership material take a look around at almost all the top leaders history has ever produced- Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Warren Buffet, Howard Schultz or Mark Cuban, all of them were sales guys.

Myth#4- Sales is a risky affair- Quite right but isn’t the same applies to every other profession in the 21st century save the public servants who run perennially on taxpayer’s money. When the economy falls everyone is impacted and sales guys feel the flak faster than anyone on planet Earth but that eventually impacts engineers, designers or anybody else in the value chain- doesn’t it?

Myth#4-You are a natural born salesman- Well that might be true for certain individuals but for every Harvey Specter there is a Mike Ross who defies conventional logic and beats the odds.Good salesmen skills could be taught over a period of time but its usually the innumerable failures that teach you better than any other course or book.Debbie Fields the founder of Mrs Fields Cookies had no formal training in business or sales but she went on to create a formidable company just by sheer virtue of perseverance.

Myth#5-A great salesman can sell anything- Sorry to disappoint but in today’s world sales cannot sell a crap product or service. The foundation of sales hinges on a state of the art service or a product no matter how much panache you dabble in while selling. Talk about Apple’s Newton or Google’s Glass or more recent Snapchat’s spectacles. Unless the product or the service has a compelling proposition that solves a customer problem its difficult to sell it not because the sales guy has deficit of skills but because selling a bad product or services badly hurts credibility of the person or the organization. So I’d not make sales for a bad product and still live with the guilt than sell a crappy product and endanger my future prospects along with my reputation.

Myth#6- Its important to aggressively sell than empathize- Wrong! At the core of sales lies customer empathy. Sales is not about pushing products down a customer’s gut. Its about having in depth understanding of a customer’s needs and then recommending a product or service that can genuinely solve the problem for the customer. Sales is all about customer satisfaction which is a function of customer empathy.

Now that we have dispelled some of the myths surrounding sales let us talk about why sales as an integral part of every organization needs to be shown equivalence amount of recognition as the other disciplines. Sales is perhaps the only organization that gets a reality check on a daily basis. These are guys who work hand in hand with the customers to know every single aspect of their lives. Might sound like a page from a John Grisham novel but sales guys are insanely aware of every single need the customer has. It is ingrained in the profession to such an extent that even if a customer sneezes the sales guys can effectively understand the ramifications of that to their existing sales process. Mind you customer wants are ephemeral in nature so there is no guarantee the customer would want a product or service tomorrow if he gets a better replacement. Capitalism is a function of consumerism and change. Change could severely devastate a company’s product or service if the sales function cannot effectively pre-empt such a move and take appropriate measures.So Nir Eyal would have talked about habit forming products in ‘Hooked’ but what he missed out is that habits are always subject to change which is where sales guys pop up. No amount of A/B testing is as effective as a candid conversation with a client.

Now the next question is that if sales is such an important part and parcel of the industry why is there so much enigma surrounding the profession. Why don’t we have people writing over it. Why doesn’t the NewYorker or Business insider or TechCrunch cover it up in their articles? Why don’t we have literature from Marx or Nietzsche or Freud talk about the same? I mean isn’t everything we do as a rational human being is selling-be it selling yourself, selling your product/service or at best selling your company to outsiders who are oblivious to the same. It seems people were so enamoured by the spirit of Creationism over the ‘Renaissance Period’ that nobody noticed till the dawn of the Industrial age how important selling as a process is. Also Evolutionary Psychologists or Anthropologists did not find a correlation when it came to Economic behavior and corresponding Decision Making until Nash, Kahneman and Tversky figured that out through their research and that paved the way for Sales as a process defined by intrinsic Psychological Principles. Funny, Human Psychology was used a lot in World War II by Germany and the Allied forces but nobody took cue from it and outlined the heuristics for a formal sales process which was inadvertently happening for the last 10000 years of human civilization post the Agricultural Revolution.

So its only in the last five decades that Sales Management did get its fair share of recognition across some Ivy Leagues which explains why half of the diaspora is still clueless about sales.Its a common notion to discard something you are not well versed wit. The fear of the unknown is too big to ignore which is why sales has been largely discarded as a dignified profession for way too long. I still remember the look on my dad’s face when he’d hear about some family friend’s son becoming a Medical Rep as opposed to me an engineer-a queer choice if anyone asked me back then.

Now that we have established sales is one of the most important jobs of the 21st century it is also imperative to figure the pedagogy or the mechanism through which colleges or universities could churn out better sales people. I was reading this book called ‘What they don’t teach you at Harvard’by Mark H. McCormack where he talks about selling and negotiation skills that are never taught about in college or if they are taught they appear animated that you only come to grasp post college through real world experiences. Essentially most of what you learn as a salesman comes through experiential learning but there are still a lot of traits that colleges could teach their students like

Trait#1- Public Speaking- Through debates, extempores or elocution contests.

Trait#2- Leadership Skills- Through sports or gamification of the course curriculum.

Trait#3- Human Psychology- By teaching tenets of human psychology as part of the course curriculum.

Trait#4- Problem Solving- By making problem solving an integral part of the curriculum.

So before I end this blog my solemn request to the intellectual diaspora would be to acknowledge Sales is important and is in no way lesser than engineering, design or any other glorified profession.Its the bolt that creates wealth that can fuel technical innovation and take us ahead leaps and bounds. I’d conclude by quoting Frank Underwood ”Take a step back. Look at the bigger picture.That’s how you devour a whale, Doug, one bite at a time”.