Are You Cut Out For A Career In Sales?

Like most people in business I spend a lot of time with sales people and/or selling myself. Often you don't think twice about the person in front of you who is showing you their product or explaining the benefits of their solution. You assume they are an authority on their product and focus on the questions that matter to you - will this address my problem? will it help me? can I/my company benefit from this. Of course you also assess whether the organization selling is right to become a partner to you and your organization, and often that starts with the quality of the relationship with the sales person in front of you. But once in a while I am stone cold surprised by the individual representing a company and its solution because they are just not an effective sales person. And it reflects poorly on their company, its products and its people.
I recently had such an experience. The salesperson in question is responsible for the overall relationship with my client - its his account - and once every quarter he shows up to check on the client. He physically spends two days with the team and makes his rounds with various stakeholders and decision makers. He is a pleasant guy who always has a smile on his face. Having watched him come into town for a few days and do his thing the past three quarters, and having attended the quarterly business reviews my client does with their team, I came to the conclusion that this guy is, simply put, in the wrong career.

Let me give you a few points about why I come to this conclusion without going into too much detail:

-> In over 4 years of being an Account Manager for my client, he has not succeeded in expanding his company’s footprint with my client even though his company can solve a number of key issues my client faces in their business;

-> According to the relationship manager he never calls in between quarterly business reviews unless he needs something from us, usually information or request to be a reference for a sales call;

-> He listens but he does not hear what the client tells him;

-> He clearly does not fully understand or know his products. If he did then he would have expanded the footprint per the earlier point. And while their products are complex solutions and require significant expertise to sell, there is no excuse for not understanding the problems they solve and sniffing out the opportunities in your client’s organization;

-> He avoids any and all confrontation, opting to leave issues and challenges unaddressed instead of bringing them out in the open and tackling them;

-> He often discusses what his other clients are doing but without linking it back to any point of significance to THIS client. If anything he makes the client feel unimportant by constantly referring to what company X or what company Y has done;

-> And the final key indicator that this man is in the wrong career – he has not met his quota once in the past 4 years (in case you are wondering how I know this, I asked him if he attended his company’s annual President’s Club event which is for all sales people who meet or exceed quota, and involves an all expenses paid trip to somewhere warm for you and your significant other. He replied he has never attended but was hoping to next year).

Enough about this guy, lets get to the salient point in my view. Are you cut out to be in sales? While I agree with the old adage that “everyone in an organization is in sales”, the fact remains that sales is a unique animal and not everyone is cut out to do it. If you have benefited from good leaders and mentors in your career then you would have had some level of direction on whether you should get into sales or not, but for the most part sales people are drawn to sales because of the huge incentives, never asking themselves the question am I cut out for this?

I fully believe that companies and their management contribute to the problem of putting the wrong salesman in the seat. Look at the resume of most (not all) sales people – they rarely stay in one place for too long. There could be many valid reasons for this, but the most common reason why sales people don’t stay in a particular role is because they are not making the kind of money they aspire to. And the most common reason for this is they have not performed. Where companies and their management make matters worse is in their approach to hiring sales people.

When I spent the better part of a decade in the spend management space I watched an army of sales people come through the door to our organization, only to move on to our nearest competitor, and then on to the next after that. A few cases had nothing to do with performance. But mostly it was a case of competitors hiring your people thinking (before or after you let them go) A) they know the space and thus can be up to speed selling faster, and 2) by hiring this person from my competitor they are hurting them! In most cases the opposite was true, they were hiring an ineffective sales person and helping the competitor and hurting themselves. Point being that sales people, more than any other function or role, seem to have numerous ships to jump to in their career, in the process evading the question of how good are they really?

Neither your customers or your management is ever going to answer the question of whether you are cut out for sales. They can fire you if you are not performing, but they can’t answer the question of whether you are in the right profession. You have to. And it’s a tough one to answer. Especially because the lure of high commissions is very strong. But ask yourself do you want to be in a role where you can never truly be successful? Are you okay with underperforming? You have one career, one shot at being successful professionally, why would you want to try to be something you are not cut out to be?

BNET UK had an interesting post by Geoffrey James the other day that is a test to see if you are made for sales. It’s a simplistic exercise and a bit of fun, but still fairly accurate in terms of whether sales is right for you. You can find the article here and it should only take you a few minutes to get through their test.

I, unfortunately, seem to have aced the test, even though I have chosen not to make sales my primary career focus. Let me know how you did!