In the spring and early summer of this year, when recruiting participants to the Finland’s Best Sales Organization competition, I talked to a lot of sales directors about what is the meaning of a great sales organization to a company. To my surprise, some of them were worried about what their customers might think, if their company profiles itself as good sales organization. One sales director even put it bluntly:
We don’t want to be viewed as a good sales organization in the eyes of the customer!
Why Do They Fear that a Customer Wouldn’t Value a Professional Sales Organization?
Where does such an attitude come from? McKinsey’s research about customers’ views, however, shows that customers actually appreciate a good buying experience very much. And a consistently high-quality buying experience can only be provide by a well-honed and professional sales organization. I think it is actually difficult to imagine that a company’s sales director – of all people – should think that a good sales organization could be seen as somehow a negative thing by customers.
The problem goes back to the seller stereotypes and the belief that the only measure of a good sales person is the financial sales performance. A typical seller’s stereotype is sleek, slick, untrustworthy, and incessantly talking pusher of the worst kind, who is trying to sell you his gadgets by any means available. This stereotype is reflected on the entire sales organization and sales culture.
If you are afraid that your customers have an equally distorted and stereotypical view of a good sales organization, are you wondering why that might that be? If the fear is justified, your own company or one of its competitors to blame?
What Exactly Is a Good Sales Organization?
A good sales organization acts professionallly, offers a smooth high-quality buying experience and provide value for customers throughout the buying cycle and beyond. A good sales organization helps customers solve their problems and achieve business objectives. Because of these things a good sales organization will also generate a good financial result. A good financial result is in fact the consequence of a systematic high quality of selling, which is surely also a benefit to the customer.
If one of your customers really sees it as a bad thing that the their supplier has a good sales organization, I doubt that they have ever seen a really good sales organization in action. If so, why not show him an example of what a truly good sales organization means?
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