Who’s Who in the Zoo
June 7, 2020 § Leave a comment
“Years ago I had the responsibility of calling on a big railroad company. We received all of their inquiries, and after we quoted, I’d interview the superintendent of motor power, the master mechanic, the superintendent of the shop, and various foremen, but always lost the orders. While I had a lot to learn about selling, I knew I couldn’t be that bad. I finally learned from a lathe operator the name of a man in the shop who was considered an authority on machine tools by all his superiors. He was making the actual decisions.”
This comes from observations made by Robert L Giebel, Chairman of Giebel, Inc. and a past President of the American Machine Tool Distributor’s Association, in a talk to a group of sales engineers.
Source: Bernard Lester | Sales Engineering, 2nd Edition (1950) pp 67 – 68
Rackham: Art and Science
October 22, 2019 § Leave a comment
Earlier this month, Neil Rackham was interviewed by one-time colleague, Greg Moore.
Amongst a wide-ranging interview is this brief nugget on the need for a firm’s best performers to be given the latitude to blend art and science in their sales approach.
“To some degree, CRM systems and their successors have really not helped the higher level of selling. The whole idea of process-driven sales, which we see happening just about everywhere, sort-of suggests that if you follow the process, you will be more successful. Well, for those people who are having difficulty, a track to run on is enormously valuable. It means that people who would otherwise fail can do a job moderately successfully. But the fact is, at higher-level selling, this is where you need the art as well as the science. It’s a very different thing, and the more you try to proceduralise it, the more you try to tie it down into a classic funnel, for example, the more you restrict your very best performers. So, one of the things I don’t like is I’m seeing a rather heavy-handed approach in many companies today, when I think it would be much, much more effective to give great latitude to the top ten per cent of performers in any sales force.” From 17’ 49” to 19’ 05”
Sales Compendium 