BEWARE OF CREATING A SALES CULTURE AT YOUR COMPANY!

In recent times many firms have mandated different functional managers to develop the sales culture in their organisations. In some of these firms this has become a critical component of performance evaluation, with almost every staff member having new business targets/quotas that must be met.

Indeed I could hardy believe it when a senior banker told me some time ago that their core business is now sales. How times have changed!

So creating a sales culture may be a popular practice these days with managers seeking to maximise revenues. But is it really a good approach to doing business?

While it may have been the way to go for most companies up to the mid 1950s, is developing the sales culture still an effective business strategy in 2016?

Here are five reasons (and we welcome your additions to this short list) why we do not recommend the practice.

FOUR REASONS TO AVOID THE SALES CULTURE

1. It can lead to poor staff morale.

Personal selling is not for everybody. Some people just don’t have the personality or disposition and would never have taken the job if they knew that they would end up in sales. Neither would you have employed them for that purpose. They don’t want to learn about sales and just hate it when they are forced to meet sales targets. When such persons are “forced into sales” it can lower morale, lead to low customer satisfaction scores, loss of customers, and a drop in productivity.

2. Many of us don’t like or trust salespeople.

2. Many of us don’t like or trust salespeople.

So many of us regard salespeople as pushy, overly aggressive, annoying, untrustworthy, etc. If this is so, why would a company who lives off the feelings and judgements of its customers encourage a corporate culture that so many of these same customers will find offensive? Come to think of it, even the salespeople themselves, perhaps in trying to escape the stigma that sometimes is attached to their profession, prefer to be called sales executives or sales consultants. Never salespeople!

3. It may not focus on customers’ wants and needs.

When you go shopping, do you prefer to go to stores that are pushing their products on you, even when you clearly don’t want their offerings? Or do you prefer to go to stores that focus on identifying your needs and wants and then satisfy them? The latter process, by the way, is one basic, if limited, definition of marketing.

4. You may miss the big picture.

Why? Because you could be measuring the wrong thing! Take the case of CSRs in a well-established bank whose name escapes me now. They were on a campaign to, and were rewarded for, increasing the number of new accounts opened. At the end of the sales campaign most CSRs busted their targets and received attractive incentives. But closer examination revealed that almost 60 per cent of these new accounts had only the minimum allowable balance! What a waste!

5. It is anchored in a business concept from a previous era.

Developing the sales culture was a product of the selling concept which is about making a sale now. But when customers are coaxed into buying a product, they may never return. What’s even worse is that some of them may even bad-mouth your business, or complain to consumer protection organisations.

So isn’t all this anecdotal, and what’s the academic reference, you ask?

Noted marketing academics Kotler and Keller (2016) claim, “The selling concept holds that consumers and businesses, if left alone, won’t buy enough of the organisation’s products. It is practiced most aggressively with unsought goods — goods buyers don’t normally think of buying such as insurance and cemetery plots — and when firms with overcapacity aim to sell what they make, rather than make what the market wants. Marketing based on hard selling is risky.”

On this matter let’s not challenge Kotler and Keller. And speaking of risky business; here’s a new equation for certain types. The sales culture + the selling concept + the hard sell = risky business!

Okay, so we do not recommend that companies create a sales culture. How then do they go about meeting their numbers? That’s an interesting question! Can we discuss a more effective approach to attaining your business-level objectives in this space next week?

Herman D Alvaranga is president of the Caribbean School of Sales Management, first in the region for sales and marketing education, training, consulting and research. E-mail Herman at hdalvaranga@cssm.edu.jm