The Hindu Business Line : Average is Great!

The superior skills of a few salespeople are detrimental to the larger good of a team dominated by those with average abilities. This piece tells you why.

A SALES organisation is essentially people-centric. The traditional and typical selling organisation is all about people. Quite unlike the formats we see in e-commerce and its many avatars of e-selling, the physical world demands the physical presence of a salesperson. Selling as a process is best facilitated that way. A person who will look into your eye and sell. A person who will give you the comfort that there are names and people you can rely on as you buy. Names and faces you can run to in the event you have to.

Selling is, therefore, about people. People sitting at both ends of the buyer-seller dyad. Yes, a time will come when salespersons will sell to pre-programmed robots that will do the task of understanding, negotiating and buying altogether, but the time is not here as yet. And yes, there will be a time when a robot will actually sell to a committee of real people who will trust a robot more than a human being. But not yet! And yes, of course, there will be the ideal day when a robot will do the selling and a robot will do the buying. A day when your front-end salesperson will be a pre-programmed asset of yours to rely on. A day when your front-end buyer as well will be a pre-programmed asset. But sadly, not yet! The human salesperson as we know him and her today is, therefore, an important entity to rely on. Let me peek into the desired levels of competencies in this piece.

People from every type of organisation have asked me in the past as to who is a good salesperson. While the answer to this is largely blowing in the wind, I keep telling organisations and people within the best of corporates alike that this person is a devil of your making. You make him the way you want. There is no "best salesperson" at all; there is just an optimally engineered salesperson for your need and want. For your specific need as a retailer or a player in the field of FMCG, durable or auto or whatever there is to sell. Let me explain.

Large corporates learnt it the hard way round. Retailers of the new age are learning it in their own way now. The large corporate went out to the best of B-schools and got the best of folk into the organisation. And then they made them into salespersons. While some sold luggage, some sold tea. And others sold toys. The corporate belief: the best salespersons are made in B-schools. The conceptual clarity B-schools imparted will be a great cutting-edge weapon out there in the great and complicated marketplace, which is largely peopled by salespersons who are commodities in their offerings.

Some great salespersons happened this way, but sooner than later, the biggies in the game of selling learnt that a few of these were just not equal to the mammoth task of selling that a large mass of land such as India demanded. Having six great salesmen was just not enough. You needed 800 of them. These six great guys from institutes of repute were just too aspirational in their delivery. They were oddballs, really. And oddballs demanded quick promotions. Quick promotions that got them to be less and less of salespersons than they were meant to be, as they climbed higher and higher. This defeated purpose!

Smaller organisations went in to recruit salespersons and recruited selling skill that was very, very superior to the need. Again here, an organisation of 200 had just about three great salespersons who were perennially the celebrated souls while the rest of the team was somewhere else! These salesmen demanded promotions every year! I tell folks in retail organisations and corporates alike, `Go for the average salespersons. Don't go for the great ones.' Recruitment of salespersons is an art and science in itself. Do it differently and do it with panache! Step one: Go out there and assess the needs of your company. What is the nature of selling you require? Is it evangelical, is it passionate, or is it just plain persuasive? How difficult is the task at hand? Check out the core competence of the person you require to do the job. And then, of course, decide how intelligent a person you need to be to fulfil the task.

All selling does not require the best of salespersons. Most organisations only require average salespersons. If you recruit super salespersons, six in number and just about average folk 400 in number, just make sure that the six do not alienate the purpose of building your selling organisation altogether. Just make sure that they are not the dissonant elements in an otherwise great team. The sales team needs to be one that is calibrated in terms of efficiency and delivery possibilities. If you need a salesperson of calibre 6 on a scale of 10, recruit every one of them in your organisation who fits a 6 or a 7 or a 5. But for heaven's sake, avoid recruiting that super salesperson of calibre 9 and 10. You don't need him.

Bringing people of that ilk into the organisation can be detrimental to the very purpose of setting up the closely-knit sales organisation itself. If the entire field force you have is largely of the same calibre, it is easier to motivate better achievement. If, however, you have six salespersons of calibre 10 who are always hitting bull's-eye in terms of their targets, the 800 others out there in your organisation will be the ones out of sorts! They know very well who is going to hit bull's-eye all the time! And that can be pretty much de-motivating in itself!

What's more, six high-calibre salespersons are detrimental to the organisation in more ways than one. The managers of these salespersons perennially focus on the achievements of these six blue-eyed super-souls. And when you do this, management attention is therefore focused and dissipated amongst a small set of people who really, really don't matter to the organisation in the real sense of the term.

Think intelligent, then. People your organisation with average people. Average salespersons who can actually do a super-average job for you. The logic is very army-like! Every infantryman must be of largely similar capability in terms of skill, courage and might. If he is superior, he must cease to be an infantryman! He must move on. Up. Or out!

(The author is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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