Water the grass and make it green
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)
Most salespeople usually liken themselves to the Foot-Soldiers in the North Korean Army or the Pawns in a game of Chess – very many and easy to sacrifice for others to continue to feed fat and live large. The assertion could not have been farther from the truth. Salespeople are actually the lifeblood of every sales organization, and understanding the role of a salesperson is the key to enjoying being a salesperson.
Sales first and foremost is a vocation of Interest and Passion… there are no Degrees or Diplomas, although there are Certifications, this is why you find a trained Engineer selling Alcoholic Beverages, or a Graduate of English selling Telecommunication Products and Services. What you need is the Passion and the Attitude to excel in it. Sales is a function that gives the opportunity to have cyclical visibility into the workings of an organization. A salesperson should have an enterpreneural outlook, always asking the question – if this were my personal business, will I do it this way? As a competent Salesperson, you need to be prepared to be able to answer any question that anyone might ask about your Organisation, Products, or Services and even your Competitors’ Products and Services. This requires the personal aptitude to continually learn and improve yourself. A salesperson that is not always prepared will always find it difficult to excel.
Now, in every structured organization, there is usually that distrust between desk functions like Human Resources, Marketing, Procurement, Finance, even Sales Support and a field function like Sale. For instance, the HR function thrives on feedbacks, thus they send surveys to the field people to fill, these surveys are explicitly included in the KPIs of the HR Personnel, but are not in the KPIs of the Sales Personnel, which means the Sales-people have to go out of their ways to make the HR achieve their KPIs whereas the HR rarely implement the suggestions in the survey, or even make the life of the sales-people difficult by installing GPS on their vehicles. This distrust only goes to worsen things because these surveys get filled with what they want to see rather than what they need to hear, thus and nothing changes. For instance, most of the other functions believe Salespeople being field people usually have many personal commitments which they use Company time and resources to meet thus having an unfair advantage, while the Salespeople also believe there are a lot of corporate opportunities which they do not have access to because they are usually on the move, and some are even in remote areas of the country far from good healthcare or opportunities for beneficial networking.
Truly, sometimes, there is a disconnect among functions thus turning complementary collaborations into competitive endeavours, all to the detriment of the employees and the organization. However, if the salespeople can try to understand their position in the bigger picture, things will definitely improve. Yes, if products and services are not sold, will the organization be able to stay afloat? Of course, it will not, but what if the products and services were not conceptualized, produced and made available to be sold, what will be the need of the salesperson? What about the people in Finance who navigate through the murky waters of book-keeping and accounting to ensure the organisation stay afloat and sometimes help partners secure funds from financial institutions so salespeople can have who to relate with? What about the Information Technology people who ensure the Salesperson is able to access their mails and even the intranet while continually on the go? I am not trying to belittle Sales, as a thoroughbred Salesperson I can never do that, but truth be told, Salespeople most times belittle other functions as if those functions are mere appendages to Sales, and they could be done away with without any negative effect, but the truth is: all functions are necessary to the growth of the organization, and the more we try to understand and collaborate, the better for all.
Taking time to find out what others do, what processes they follow, what softwares do they use, etc, will help you to better understand how they work, you can even suggest improvements; and inviting others to come and share your daily experience will also help a great deal to shorten the distance between you and them. You might even ask for secondment to other functions (if allowed), this will definitely broaden your horizon, and when you come back to Sales, you would have become better at strategizing and responding tactically to issues. This will put you in good stead for higher responsibilities and definitely advance your career. The truth is: the grass is not always greener on the other side, and even when it is, you can water your grass too and make it as green, if not greener than the other side.
