Two styles of management with different attitudes towards daily performance manage to orient the valuable potential of each of the representatives towards diametrically opposite destinations.
In "traditional management of selling" the first of the options in the title of this article prevails, while the second corresponds to the profile of "the professional of the sale".
In several of the articles, as well as in each of the books published on the subject, the difference between the two profiles of sales representatives and their destination has been described.
In order to provide greater clarity to this qualification, the generic personality characteristics that best reflect each of these groups of sellers are described below, with the sole purpose of better understanding the reasons that lead them to so many different destinations.
The traditional seller
Each seller with a traditional profile feels and believes that they have self-sufficiency in the activity. For this reason, refresher readings, training courses that provide you with new tools and strengths for better management and consequently better income, do not occupy a prominent place on your value scale.
Believing that he has the basic and necessary conditions for management, whether real or due to the conviction or mandate of his family and friends, he is convinced that "he was born for sale".
This "self-sufficiency" leads him to look with contempt or haughtiness at another more experienced colleague or his supervisor or manager, at his advice or recommendations, because he knows that he is for sale learning through his own experiences, even at the cost of mistakes. that inevitably are committed and harm the satisfaction that your customers deserve.
His lack of knowledge usually disguises them with evasions, aplomb attitudes and even with "white lies", which is immediately perceived by his interlocutors who begin to distrust him and, although they do not express it, they disqualify him as a seller, extending it to its products or services, its brands and the company it represents.
He is messy with his "papers," especially with his contact and customer records, relying exclusively on his memory and intuition. For this reason, he uses his calendar mainly to update his telephone directory and call his contacts when he suddenly remembers that there is a valid reason, but not to plan his valuable time each day and week of the month to reach his maximum productive potential..
He feels that preparing the daily reports of his management is a mere bureaucratic aspect that takes valuable minutes of his time that could well be dedicated to doing more business and also prefers to tell his superior what he has done and what he plans to do, coffee in the middle. Deep down, he is convinced that no one should invade his "salesperson-contacts" privacy and management independence, because only he knows how to close good deals.
At the beginning of each month he feels an emptiness of opportunities to achieve the goal of the period, but deep down he feels that he is "enlightened by fortune" and that he will not lack opportunities as he had in several of his previous periods.
And for all the aforementioned, every day of its management "goes out to see what happens" in its assigned territory or field of action, achieving uncertain results, without consistency and characterized by a high concentration of closings of doubtful satisfaction in its clients and always on the last days of each month.
In case of not achieving your periodic goals, apply a creative repertoire of excuses to justify your poor results. He is never the culprit but the extraordinary unforeseen adversities that he has had to live.
The professional seller
The professional salesman is convinced that all his productive potential is based on the strengths, knowledge, abilities and skills to incorporate, in his permanent update in the activity he loves, even if he knows that he does not have all the conditions.
Perhaps "it was not born for sale," but for some reason in his life he has come to discover it, exercise it, respect it, and even love it.
Lacking some of the basic and necessary conditions for management, it constantly seeks to acquire and incorporate them with avidity and humility that facilitates the assimilation of everything that it considers efficient to apply in its activity.
He invests in reading books and articles in his specialty, research, and applies self-analysis of his successes and errors with the consequent improvement changes.
He discovered the difference between "listening" and "understanding" the neighbor, adopting the attitude of advisor backed by his solid knowledge in what he offers, providing satisfactions and solutions "tailored" to each need or problem of the interlocutors he interviews.
Sincerity, humility and self-criticism, are what allow you to progress on every mistake you may make and the serenity, confidence and security of your arguments manage to generate the best quality results in each of your sales.
It is ordered and organized, so the management of information about contacts and clients allows you to plan each day of your activity, which translates into achievements of quality, quantity and consistency.
You don't want to waste time explaining to your manager or supervisor everything you do daily with each client. For this reason, it values making its daily management report and analyzing the information that its registration and processing provides.
The importance that you assign to the variable "time" forces you to make every minute of your days work through intelligent planning of your daily, weekly and monthly actions.
For this seller profile, the monthly closing is a mere administrative-accounting cut, since its production is obtained in a more stable and even way in each of the weeks of each period.
In short, the professional salesman described here always "goes out to make it happen" every day.
And in the case of not achieving your goals due to different circumstances, in the first place, you are responsible for what you have not obtained. Then, he analyzes his actions, corrects his mistakes and tries to compensate in the following periods what he did not get in the past.
Conclusions
The results obtained in each period have a direct "cause and effect" relationship with the management that is carried out to obtain them.
As I have stated in several previous articles, it is not the seller's fault that it does not generate the expected performance, but is the sole responsibility of the person who has selected it and maintains it on their team, without having applied effective corrective improvement actions.
After sharing these two management options, two realities that will achieve different results are exposed and aim to open the space for a timely analysis reflection of what is being done in each sales team of any organization.
© Copyright 2008, by Martín E. Heller
