Rasheed’s Diary: The Fundamentals of Sales
THE DIARY OF A PROTEAN SALESMAN
With
Rasheed Adewusi
(Rasheed is a Sales Manager in one the telecommunication companies operating in Nigeria. He also runs the personal blog, Wise, Wide and Wild)
Sales as an activity might look ubiquitous, but the fundamentals guiding the outcomes are the same everywhere. Whether it is heavy machinery, or cooking ingredients, the fundamentals to selling them are the same. When I say “fundamentals”, I mean those activities that are compulsory as enablers for sales – activities such as Product/Service Quality, Product/Service Availability, Visibility, Pricing, and Persuasion, to a larger extent; and Promotion to a lesser extent. These enablers are the determinants for Sales to either sail through or fall through. For this exposition to be impactful, these fundamentals must not be glossed over, thus this article will only introduce them while subsequent articles will look at each one in-depth.
Product/Service Quality: This is the most important of all the enablers because it is actually what you want to sell. The word “quality” here does not exclusively mean the Product/Services must be the best-in-class or the best-of-the-best, it simply means whatever you promise the customer or client in terms of product/service design, features, abilities, etc should be exactly what they will get when they buy the product/service. Do not position a mass market product as a premium product, and do not offer add-on services as exclusive. The danger in not adhering to this is that most customers normally research options and sample opinions before deciding on a purchase and if they realized you have been trying to con them, the trust, which is the basis of continuous relationship, would have been broken with consequent negative impact.
Product/Service Availability: This is arguably the most critical of all the fundamentals. Products/Services must never be unavailable, unless they are being phased out. It is totally pointless to put in the effort and then an order is made, but the obligation to supply cannot be met. Considering that most customers do not make orders until when they really have to, the non-availability might push them to your close competitor and getting them back might become a big problem. Proper inventory management is the key to avoiding this, and when it inevitably happens, openness with customers viz-a-viz the timeline for resolution is the key to managing the situation.
Visibility: Of what use is beauty that is covered in layers of black cloth and stored in a trashcan? Whatever product/service you have to sell, you must make the target audience to be aware of them and you must make them know where to get them and when they eventually get there, they must see them on display. This is why Fortune 100 Companies continue to spend billions on advertising, while the man selling apple at the bus-park arranges his wares aesthetically, and the salon at the street junction is named “Beauty Embassy”.
Pricing: This fundamental is the trickiest to control of all the fundamentals. It is very tricky in that be it selling above or below the recommended price, either way, it is detrimental to the sales and growth of the business. Normally, you can recommend prices to resellers but you are still at the mercy of the forces of demand and supply; and even discounts and seasonal incentives actually look like bottlenecks in the long run. But if pricing can be got right, sales become very easy.
Persuasion: This is where the Salesperson has to hone all their skills together to aggregate the benefits of all the other fundamentals to close the sales. This involves deploying a range of skills from analytical, problem-solving, and inter-personal to achieve the aim.
Stay loyal to this column for indepth discussion of these fundamentals in subsequent posts.
