Who contributes most to profit?

The study of marketing is a fascinating science. The practice of marketing, long held as the domain of creative types, can be thrilling. And then there is sales.

Back in 2001 favourite marketers Bill Bearden, Tom Ingram and Buddy LaForge declared, “Sales personnel, along with management, are the prime bearers of the burden of contributing to profit by producing revenue.”

There was a time (hopefully long gone) when if you didn’t qualify for anything else and were a smooth talker, there was always a place for you in sales. That’s often who was left to bear the burden of contributing to profit — the lowly salesperson.

Not the marketer. And don’t even mention finance.

Twelve years is a long time in business “Please don’t teach my people to sell. We don’t want salespeople in our company.”

— Senior General Insurance Executive, 2004 “We want all of our staff to become salespeople.”

— (Same) Senior General Insurance Executive, 2016 Twelve years is a long time in business! And my insurance executive is not alone, for, reflecting the current mood in corporate Jamaica, just last week two CEOs made it clear to me that they wanted everyone in their respective companies to become salespeople. But is this what they should want? Come to think of it, how much do we really know about sales, and what is the source of our knowledge? Let’s take a perspective from a very credible source

— Harvard Business Review (HBR). “Of all the topics in the field of business, sales has probably gotten the least attention from serious researchers… The popular literature on sales management is just that: popular. Some is very good indeed

— full of street smarts and occasionally grounded in empirical research. But a lot is rah-rah, testosterone- pumping stuff whose primary purpose seems to be to lend hardcover legitimacy to the author’s career as a sales conference motivational speaker.”

— Thomas A Stewart, editor, Harvard Business Review, July-August, 2006

HBR was spot on!

I smiled when I first read that HBR editorial, but five years later, when I was asked to design, develop and deliver a course in sales for graduate students at our region’s favourite university, the reality hit me with the force of a runaway Leyland truck heading down the North-South Highway.

OMG! Where would I find an appropriate text on sales, and the requisite reading list for young scientists who were taking their first business course?

Sure there were several popular books on sales, but unlike the books on marketing, they had very little by way of citations or references and could not enter the classroom.

THE MOST POPULAR SALE OF ALL TIME?

Sales and salespeople have been with us for a very long time. Who can forget the sale of Yosef as recorded in the book of Genesis?

“So when the Midyanim, merchants passed by, they drew and lifted Yosef out of the cistern and sold him for half a pound of silver shekels to the Yisma’elim, who took Yosef on to Egypt.” (Complete Jewish Bible, Genesis 37v28).

I can well imagine that astute Jew, Y’hudah, (note it was also a Y’hudah who sold Yeshua) making a presentation and pointing out the features and benefits of trading Yosef because, “Now Yosef was well-built and handsome as well.” (CJB, Genesis 39v6).

What a sale! Imagine someone paying you to take your problem off your hands. How you wish that selling in 2017 could be that simple! Wishful thinking — for with easy access to information, today most buyers are way ahead of sellers.

Further, key account management and sales negotiation is a complex process that is the job of specialists who are not merely trained in sales, but who are also educated in business.

But let’s move on from Y’hudah and that simple sale and fast-forward 5,000 years to Peter Drucker, the acknowledged father, or is it grandfather, of modern management theory. Here are arguably two of Drucker’s best-known quotes:

“The aim of marketing is to understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

“The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”

So if the purpose of marketing is to make selling superfluous, why then are they so often at war instead of working as one seamless unit or department?

ENDING THE WAR BETWEEN MARKETING AND SALES

As Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy said in what surely deserves to be seen as a seminal paper entitled ‘Ending the War Between Marketing and Sales’, “Salespeople accuse marketers of being out of touch with what customers really want or setting prices too high.

Marketers insist that salespeople focus too myopically on individual customers and short-term sales at the expense of longer-term profits.

Result? Poor coordination between the two teams — which only raises market-entry costs, lengthens sales cycles, and increases cost of sales.”Marketing as a discipline has its roots in sales.

Over time, due perhaps to the ambitions of the new science of marketing, the two became separate and, in many cases, estranged. But a reunification of the two is inevitable; perhaps imminent.

This marketer has had a front-row seat in the arena of sales and marketing management for a very long time, and is of the considered view that in another 10 years there will no longer be separate marketing and sales departments in most companies.

By then marketing as practised by most companies will be dead! So too the sales guru.

And training in the psychology of selling, and ‘solutions selling’, a practice introduced by John Henry Patterson at NCR way back in 1895 (a time when salesmen rode horses) will have become irrelevant.

And sales will be considered a profession on par with marketing or finance.

What do you think, and shall we continue our discussion on fusing marketing and sales next week?

Herman D Alvaranga is president of the Caribbean School of Sales Management (CSSM), the region’s first Public Training College specialising in sales, marketing and brand management education, consulting and research. E-mail hdalvaranga@ cssm.edu.jm