You’ve created a great product, you’ve priced it right, and you’ve set a wonderful marketing communication strategy in motion. Now you can just sit back and watch the sales roll in, right? Probably not. Unless your company is able to sell the product entirely over the Internet, you probably have a lot more work to do. For example, if you want consumers to be able to buy the product in a retail store, someone will first have to convince the retailer to carry the product.

“Nothing happens until someone sells something,” is an old saying in business. But in reality, a lot must happen before a sale can be made. Companies count on their sales and marketing teams not only to sell products but to the lay the groundwork to make it happen. However, salespeople are expensive. Often they are the most expensive element in a company’s marketing strategy. As a result, they have to generate business in order to justify a firm’s investment in them.

Creating Value

Consider the following situations:

• At the beginning of the chapter, we described a real-life situation—a cardiac surgeon with a high-risk patient is wondering what to do. The physician calls Ted Schulte at Guidant to get his input on how to handle the situation. Schulte recommends the appropriate pacemaker and offers to drive one hundred miles early in the morning in order to be able to answer any questions that might arise during the surgery.
• A food wholesaler is working overtime to prepare invoices. Unfortunately, one out of five has a mistake. The result is that customers don’t get their invoices in a timely fashion, so they don’t pay quickly and don’t pay the correct amounts. Consequently, the company has to borrow money fulfill its payroll obligations. Jay King, a salesperson from DG Vault, recommends the wholesaler purchase an electronic invoicing system. The wholesaler does. Subsequently, it takes the wholesaler just days to get invoices ready, instead of weeks. And instead of the invoices being only 80 percent accurate, they are close to being 100 percent accurate. The wholesaler no longer has trouble meeting its payroll because customers are paying more quickly.
• Sanderson Farms, a chicken processor, wants to build a new plant near Waco, Texas. The chambers of commerce for several towns in the area vie for the project. The chamber representative from Waco, though, locates an enterprise zone that reduces the company’s taxes for a period of time, and then works with a local banker to get the company better financing. In addition, the rep gets a local technical college involved so Sanderson will have enough trained employees. These factors create a unique package that sells the company on setting up shop in Waco.

All these are true stories of how salespeople create value by understanding the needs of their customers and then create solutions to meet those needs. Salespeople can adapt the offering, such as in the Sanderson Farms example, or they can adapt how they present the offering so that it is easier for the client to understand and make the right decision.

Adapting a message or product on the fly isn’t something that can be easily accomplished with other types of marketing communication. Granted, some Web sites are designed to adapt the information and products they display based on what a customer appears to be interested in while he or she is looking at the sites. But unless the site has a “chat with a representative” feature, there is no real dialogue occurring. The ability to engage in dialogue helps salespeople better understand their customers and their needs and then create valuable solutions for them.

Note also that creating value means making sales. Salespeople sell—that’s the bulk of the value they deliver to their employers. There are other ways in which they deliver value, but it is how much they sell that determines most of the value they deliver to their companies.

Salespeople aren’t appropriate channels for companies in all situations, however. Some purchases don’t require the salesperson’s expertise. Or the need to sell at a very low cost may make retail stores or online selling more attractive. But in situations requiring adaptation, customer education, and other value-adding activities, salespeople can be the best channel to reach customers.

Managing Relationships

Because their time is limited, sales representatives have to decide which accounts they have the best shot at winning and which are the most lucrative. Once a salesperson has decided to pursue an account, a strategy is devised and implemented, and if a sale happens, the salesperson is also responsible for ensuring that the offering is implemented properly and to the customer’s satisfaction.

We’ve already emphasized the notion of “customers for life” in this book. Salespeople recognize that business is not about making friends, but about making and retaining customers. Although buyers tend to purchase products from salespeople they like, being liked is not enough. Salespeople have to ensure that they close the deal with the customer. They also have to recognize that the goal is not to just close one deal, but as many deals as possible in the future.

Gathering Information

Salespeople are boundary spanners, in that they operate outside the boundaries of the firm and in the field. As such, they are the first to learn about what competitors are doing. An important function for them, then, is to report back to headquarters about their competitors’ new offerings and strategies.

Similarly, salespeople interact directly with customers and, in so doing, gather a great deal of useful information about their needs. The salespeople then pass the information along to their firms, which use it to create new offerings, adjust their current offerings, and reformulate their marketing tactics. The trick is getting the information to the right decision makers in firms. Many companies use customer relationship management (CRM) software like Netsuite or Salesforce.com to provide a mechanism for salespeople to enter customer data and others to retrieve it. A company’s marketing department, for example, can then use that data to pinpoint segments of customers with which to communicate directly. In addition to using the data to improve and create and marketing strategies, the information can also help marketing decision makers understand who makes buying decisions, resulting in such decisions as targeting trade shows where potential buyers are likely to be. In other words, marketing managers don’t have to ask salespeople directly what customers want; they can pull that information from a customer database.

Types of Sales Positions

There are different ways to categorize salespeople. They can be categorized by the customers they work with, such as whether they are consumers, other businesses, or government institutions. Another way to categorize salespeople is by the size of their customers. Most professional sales positions involve selling to other businesses, but many also sell to consumers like you. For the purposes of this book, we will categorize salespeople by their activities. Using activities as a basis, there are four basic types of salespeople: missionary salespeople, trade salespeople, prospectors, and account managers. In some discussions, you’ll hear that there are three types: order getters, order takers, and sales support. The four we describe in the following are all types of order getters; that is, they actively seek to make sales by calling on customers. We’ll also discuss order takers and sales support after we discuss the four types of order getters.

Prospectors

A prospector is a salesperson whose primary function is to find prospects, or potential customers. The potential customers have a need, but for any number of reasons, they are not actively looking for products to meet those needs—perhaps because they lack information about where to look for them or simply haven’t had the time to do so. Prospectors often knock on a lot of doors and make a lot of phone calls, which is called cold calling because they do not know the potential accounts and are therefore talking to them “cold.” Their primary job is to sell, but the activity that drives their success is prospecting. Many salespeople who sell to consumers would be considered prospectors, including salespeople such as insurance or financial services salespeople, or cosmetic salespeople such as those working for Avon or Mary Kay.

In some B2B situations, the prospector finds a prospect and then turns it over to another salesperson to close the deal. Or the prospector may take the prospect all the way through the sales process and close the sale. The primary responsibility is to make sales, but the activity that drives the salesperson’s success is prospecting.

Account Managers

Account managers are responsible for ongoing business with a customer who uses a product. A new customer may be found by a prospector and then turned over to an account manager, or new accounts may be so rare that the account manager is directly responsible for identifying and closing them. For example, if you sold beds to hospitals, new hospital organizations are rare. A new hospital may be built, but chances are good that it is replacing an existing hospital or is part of an existing hospital chain, so the account would already have coverage.

Other Types of Sales Positions

Earlier, we stated that there are also order takers and sales support. These other types of salespeople do not actively solicit business. Order takers, though, do close sales while sales support do not. Order takers include retail sales clerks and salespeople for distributors of products, like plumbing supplies or electrical products, who sell to plumbers and electricians. Other order takers may work in a call center, taking customer sales calls over the phone or Internet when customers initiate contact. Such salespeople carry sales quotas and are expected to hit those sales numbers.

Sales support work with salespeople to help make a sale and to take care of the customer after the sale. At ResearchNow, a marketing research company headquartered in Dallas, sales support help salespeople price projects and prepare bids. At Oracle, an information systems provider, sales support assist by engineering solutions and, like at ResearchNow, pricing offerings and preparing proposals. At ResearchNow, the sales support staff also helps deliver the project, whereas at Oracle, another team takes over when the sale is made.