The Hindu Business Line : The special and the general

We don't have much of a choice on the gender side of the issue. We are born the way we are. And aggressive versus demure is a character trait in itself. No choice there as well.

The question then arises. Must a salesperson be a specialist or a generalist? Remember, you can be either. It is for you to choose, possibly right at the start of a career in selling.

This piece is therefore targeted more at the army of young men and women who are just entering the profession of selling, or have just about put in a couple of years in the passion-circle of sales-folk.

In order to get an answer, let's meet both these guys who clutter our sales-scape. We meet them literally every living selling day.

Meet Specialist Saravanan first. SS is a category specialist.

As in the case of most of us, he accidentally fell into the profession of selling. There was just no plan in life at all. No macro plan that got him into the daunting line of selling. Selling just happened to him.

Saro started his career selling generic bulk drugs. He then graduated into the branded form of the business. Pharma selling, they called it. It sounded interesting. The lifestyle was different.

Saro had a beat to cover. Work would begin at seven in the morning, if you called boarding a bus to reach a distant doctor work. He would cover seven doctors in the morning. He would wait outside their clinics in germ-ridden waiting rooms along with coughing children, grumbling women and fever-ridden fathers. If waiting meant work, he was at work all the while.

He would finish the beat of seven doctors, communicating the positives of the pill, the generic advantages, the price structure, the chemical composition, and, of course, the various schemes on the various recommendations that could be totalled up.

Saro would leave behind a calendar, a Post-it pad with overt branding of the paracetamol or erectile dysfunction tablet being peddled ... and, at times, a paperweight.

Having covered a beat of seven doctors, it was lunchtime. Lunch was had and Saro would check into the neighbourhood lodge to just go and sleep. The evening beat was to begin at six. Three more doctors to cover then. A bunch of chemists to touch, and the day would be wrapped up.

SS is a specialist salesman. A category specialist who, with every passing day, becomes more and more of a specialist. His core competence is the doctor and chemist. He's a specialist in love with the category and content with the channel. And incompetent in any other! His core line of contentment is the interaction he is able to live through every passing day, with doctor, compounder, chemist and shop boy alike. Shake him out of it, and he feels like a fish out of water!

Meet the other guy then. Meet Generalist Ganesh. GG is a generalist from the start. He started off selling tea in the rural markets of a distant Peddapuram. He graduated from markets rural to markets urban. He was posted in Hyderabad for five whole years. His company started making motorcycles as part of a mad hatter's diversification dream, and Generalist Ganesh was the first choice to tout the motorcycle even.

GG made a name for himself in the market for motorcycles as well. The venture closed down, and GG was moved to look after the selling of spices and condoms. GG did well here as well. Generalist Ganesh is a generalist salesperson. A guy who can sell tea with the same panache of selling a motorcycle, just as he can tout a condom to one as he touts puliyogare powder to another!

Both Specialist Saravanans and Generalist Ganeshs exist in our selling lives. We meet them every passing day. You could be one or the other. The choice is yours.

The specialist salesperson is specialist to category. At times specialist to channel as well. And certainly specialist to type of consumers he sells to.

A salesperson selling to the retail channel is a misfit at times in a channel that is wholesale. His mindset is quite stuck in the paradigm of small retail offtakes.

A salesperson selling pharma is a misfit selling FMCG. The customer is a different kind of guy. The doctor was a good guy to sell to.

A salesperson selling to the Canteen Stores Department is a misfit selling to the wholesale channel. The dynamics of business is entirely different.

A salesperson selling to the institutional business channel is not quite a champ at selling to the retail business. A person selling insurance is just not comfortable enough in the market of selling telecom products and services!

A salesperson from the hospitality industry is all at sea selling to the rustic market that buys detergents and soaps.

By the very token of all that we have explored thus far, there is indeed no generalist salesman at all! Maybe the tribe is dead and dying. There is just not a realm of selling work that can be called generalist anymore, I guess. The choice is, therefore, made. You just need to be a specialist salesperson.

A specialist salesperson who operates in the ambit of a cluster of possibilities.

Take the hospitality cluster as an example. This cluster is all about the competence a salesperson develops selling the product and service of a hotel's banquets, its room nights, and maybe even its branded restaurants. The very salesperson will adjust reasonably well in the business of a hospital. Maybe even fine in the business of customer care within a BPO outfit.

Sit down and draw a circle of possibilities a salesperson can find for himself when challenged to find a new job. The longer the radius of the circle, the larger the possibility of a job and the more generalist a salesperson you are. Smaller the radius, more is the niche status of your specialisation as a salesperson.

A good hedge in the life of a salesperson is to occupy the terrain of a wider circle of possibilities. If you really can't be there in that charmed circle with the long radius you will draw for yourself, stay in that short radius specialist selling job of yours, but for heaven's sake, negotiate a salary multiple that will give you the security a specialist needs to have!

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

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