By Andrew Yusko
In his book Hope Is Not A Strategy, Rick Page details how many organizations have a “hope” mentality when it comes to their sales and sales teams. They hopetheir production is good enough, they hopethat their product is enough of a need, or they just flat out hopethat business will come in just because they are a business.
I have found this to be true in many of the organizations that I have worked for and consulted for. Now understand me, I am not saying that companies don’t want to have a strategy that doesn’t include the word “hope.” It is that many of these companies don’t know how to do it or where to start.
For most of my career I have been somewhat of a “builder”. My wife even told me this yesterday saying, “I feel like everywhere you go, whether it is in business or in ministry, you go places to help them build something, whether a department or a ministry, and then you move on to somewhere else. It is what you are good at.” It isn’t that I haven’t considered this before, but I think most people can relate to the truth that it is one thing to think something about yourself and another to have someone tell you. As I look at my career, most of the work that I have done has been with organizations that lack structure in some areas, most of them in the arena of sales. I come in and help establish a foundation, build systems, processes, reporting, develop training, and otherwise create infrastructure that didn’t exist before. Then I tend to move on to other areas or other organizations.
With this in mind, I want to share on one of the areas that I think is vitally important for organizations that are starting to build infrastructure and move from where Hopeis the strategy to a more cohesive plan. That area is the identification of the players on the team. In another book I read recently titled Tractionthe author, Gino Wickman, spends a great deal of time talking about identifying the strengths of your employees, making sure they are in the correct seat on the bus, and if they should be on the bus at all. He said that one of the hardest things he ever had to do was to fire talented and successful people, simply because they didn’t fit with the culture of the company that he was creating. There is an entire other article there that I could write on, but for now I just want to help with the types of sales people that exist and how to identify them.
To do this, I will go back to Hope Is Not A Strategyand examine Rick Pages perspective on the types of sales people. He examines and details that there are 7 types of sales people out there. They are:
1. The Teller
2. The Consultative Seller
3. The Hunter
4. The Farmer
5. The Business Developer
6. The Partner
7. The Industry-Networked Consultant
These types of sales people are in no particular order. Just because number one is “The Teller” doesn’t mean it is greater or worse than the “The Hunter” that is number three. This is just detailing the types of sales people that exist. I will go one by one through the first three of these seven this week and briefly detail their characteristics and how to identify them. You will have to come back next week for the second installment.
The Teller
The teller is the product guru. They are the features guy. This sales person shows up and talks a lot about the way that a product works and all of its intricacies. Rick Page details them like this: “Although product knowledge is important for credibility, tellers feel they can simply explain enough features about the product or service that eventually they will hit something the client likes. Linkage of features to benefits is left to the buyer.”
The easiest way to identify this type of sales person is if you ride with them and they show up and throw up. This sales person is not going to be asking a lot of questions they are going to be doing a lot of talking. I would say that this is a sales person that will have limited success in most industries unless you purpose them into a “technical” sales lead that will work with a traditional “account manager” type role. Otherwise, the teller is more suited for a retail sales environment. The one benefit is that with training a “teller” can be made into a great sales person because of their deep understand of product knowledge.
The Consultative Seller
The consultative seller is basically the exact opposite of the teller. It is not that the consultative seller does not possess product knowledge, they are often experts in this area. What sets them apart is that this sales person is a question asker and a listener. Rick Page says it this way: “The best sales people (in SPIN sales study) were not necessarily the best talkers. They were the best listeners. Listen first, talk second. This was the birth of consultative selling… They used the classic tools of probing – who, how, what, why, when, and where – as well as reflexive probes such as, ‘Oh tell me more,’ to keep the client talking.”
The easiest way to identify this type of sales person is to see how they interact with their customers. Do they ask a lot of questions? Do they use the probing questions referenced above? Do they get the client talking and keep them talking? If that is the case, then there is a good chance that you are working with a consultative seller. These sales people are best suited for complex sales. Either ones that generate long-term ongoing business, or ones that require uncovering intricacies or pain points in order to get prospects to buy. Understand that a complex sale doesn’t just mean expensive, in most cases it means that there isn’t an obvious need or that your product is just more expensive than a similar product. Again, there is a lot there to unpack, but I will leave that for another time.
The Hunter
Most people’s understanding of sales is that there are two types; hunters and not hunters. The hunter in many ways is what I would describe as the pure salesperson. They are the competitive alpha in the office that makes everything a competition and wants to win everything. They love going head to head against the competition and revel at the opportunity to compete. They also hate losing. Rick page describes them like this: “The hunters make things happen. They are the fighter pilots of the sales world. They understand how to defeat the competitor’s strategy as well as their product. The hunter focusses on winning competitive, comparative evaluations, quite often in new-name business. They are at their best when they face obstacles and competition. They influence, to the degree they can, the competition the politics, and the process to their advantage.”
The easiest way to identify this type of sales person isn’t how you think. Many believe that the hunter is the guy going out searching for new business, however that is not always true. The way you identify a hunter is by their competition level. Hunters love competition, they don’t care if they are bidding against others they welcome the challenge of winning over competitors. The hunter will usually have a lot of customers that put their projects out to bid to multiple people, they like and thrive in this environment. Hunters are great sales people to put in roles where there is a lot of competition and where they will have to win over the trust of customers and overcome the obstacles their competition puts in front of them.
In part two of this two-part series I will detail the other four types of sales people as well as the reasons why this is so important. As a leader, whether sales or otherwise, you should want to know the key strengths and weaknesses of your sales team so that you can put them in the right chair to help you grow the company.
Make sure you don’t forget to check back in next week for part two.
Andrew T. Yusko Jr.
Director of Sales
Campany Roof Maintenance
&
Managing Consultant
Yusko Consulting Services LLC
For information on the book Hope Is Not A Strategy go here.
For information on the book Traction go here.
Komentáře