The Hindu Business Line : Insecurity sells

Look at it this way. Your best salesman is possibly the most insecure. In more ways than one. You probably don't see this. He probably doesn't show it. Insecurity breeds success. Insecurity breeds drive. The drive to achieve. The yen to perform and over-perform.

Politically correct organisations are the ones that overtly love the image of the secure organisation. The secure set of salespeople. This is, at best, just an image. In fact, the feeling of security in itself creates for the lazy organisation with the lazy selling man. And lazy selling men do not perform.

Most sales managers are politically correct people. A lifetime of dealing with men and matters out in the front-end of the marketplace has made them that. The smiling visage that is a must for a salesman in the field, the long hours of debate with the person you are selling to, and most certainly the final diktat that the buyer is always right, is something that makes a salesperson with some years of selling life a rather correct person.

This correctness of the sales manager translates into a certain staidness when dealing with his people. A staidness of approach that will have him auto-suggest to his people that everything around the immediate environment he has made his working home and hearth is alright.

Therefore, if you are a salesperson in the field, just don't expect your sales manager to tell you that he and you work in the most insecure workplace there is to survive in.

Nothing wrong in that, really. You don't need your boss to tell you that tomorrow you die the life of a salesman in the workplace of choice. You don't want your boss to tell you that the next month's salary bank transfer may or may not appear on time. Or appear at all, for that matter.

The purpose of this piece, then, is to showcase and bring to the fore the culture of insecurity that the selling system breeds and lets loose into the workplace. Time to sit up, take note, and possibly even say that insecure people sell best. Bring insecurity into the open, then, as a tool to achieve! Nothing new here. Lots of you have been using it all the time, but never ever admitted it to yourself or anyone else.

Think! Think of the time your boss came up to you at the end of the quarter and did one of two things. He put on his most worried face kept for special occasions such as this. The frown on face, the sad and perfunctory greeting. You knew by his very manner of walking that something was up.

Yes, something was up. This was the quarter-end. Volumes overall were down by 9 per cent. This had to be made up somehow or the other. He looked you in the eye and asked you how much you could chip in with. You got carried away by the gravity of the moment and stretched yourself that much more.

Think, then, of the boss who told you that your appraisal was coming up and if it was to be a good one, you had to perform. Think of the boss who told you he would fire you in six months if this continued. Think of the benign boss who told you that he himself might be fired the next month if things did not improve. Or the even more benign boss who told you that he was seriously considering a VRS if sales from his team kept going the way it did.

All of this put that bit of pressure on you. And guess what, you stretched that much more to achieve. You did it!

Pressure helps. Pressure delivers. Pressure causes pressure-selling at every level of the selling chain. Insecurity of the future ahead is possibly a great motivator. Possibly a motivator that is better by a multiple to all the positive motivational tools the men in selling adopt all the while.

The fact is this. Positive motivational rewards, be it training abroad, a trip to the Bahamas with your wife, a gold chain to take home, absolute hard cash or that ubiquitous VIP suitcase as a prize for a quarterly achievement, are really strokes that leave the option of adoption with you. You decide whether you put in your best to get that freebie on float. You decide whether you bite the carrot or not.

The stick as a pressure device is different. You the salesperson have no option on accepting the beating. The matter is simple and succinct. If you don't do something, you get beaten. And that is something you want to avoid at all costs! And a beating makes one run faster.

Citius. Altius. Fortius. Higher. Faster. Stronger. In the Olympics of selling, one is forever in the vortex of the insecurity business. In a Chakravyuvh of sorts. Every quarter, then, is a point of insecurity. There are clear goals laid out for each in the game. If you achieve these, you are a happening sales person. If you don't, you are going to survive for a while, but the air is thick with insecurity all around.

Should companies use the device of insecurity they use today covertly in a more overt manner? Should insecurity management be made a science in itself, outside of the art as it is practised today?

The politically incorrect answer of the day is a big Yes!

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

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