Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2014; the fixed monthly salaries of 1,000, 1,500 or 2,000 euros it mentions for sales jobs reflect Spain at that time.
“It’s so hard to hire a good sales rep,” say many business owners. “What lousy conditions for a sales job,” say many salespeople. The fact is that when a sales rep goes looking for work, they usually come across two kinds of job offer.
The first is where a company is looking for a sales rep and offers a commercial contract (a contrato mercantil, under which the company does not register the salesperson with Spain’s Social Security and pays no fixed salary). This person will only be paid according to the sales they make: 100% pure commission.
There’s nothing wrong with this way of working in itself for a salesperson, and depending on the type of sale, you can even make a lot of money.
In this case there are hardly any requirements to get the job: they don’t ask for sales experience or qualifications, and they’ll do everything they can to persuade you to work with them.
The problem is that there are now many job offers of this kind that I personally consider fraudulent, because the salesperson is told that if they hit a certain target, after three months they’ll be given an employment contract and become part of the company’s staff with a fixed salary plus commission, even a company car. There’s your motivation to work hard.
But most of these new companies don’t really want you to be a sales star. Their business model is based on a constant coming and going of salespeople who close a few contracts and then leave the company, because those few contracts aren’t enough to cover their expenses.
This is the technique currently used by some insurance companies and, more recently, by some subcontractors of electricity companies. They hire you on commission with the promise that if you beat a target within three months, they’ll give you better working conditions. But all they really want is for you to sell policies to your family and friends, because those are usually the first people young salespeople turn to in order to meet their targets. And naturally, your parents, brothers and sisters, cousins and friends decide to sign up as a favour to help you keep your job.
There are companies that have lived for more than 10 years solely on the few contracts brought in over the years by the hundreds or thousands of salespeople who pass, and will pass, through the company. They aren’t trained or prepared, because these companies know that a career selling insurance (to take one example) can be very profitable, but only in the long run. It can take you years to build up your own client portfolio and make a reasonable living from it; it’s rare for anyone to manage it in a few months, which is why most people who start out in this sector do it part-time until they can do it full-time.
Obviously, we’re not talking here about some of the more serious companies, which invest in a person with reasonably good working conditions in the hope that they’ll build a career within the company.
That said, despite the dreadful conditions, and sometimes the dreadful products or services, of these companies that live off a constant stream of salespeople who last no more than three months, around 5% of these salespeople say they take advantage of this kind of hard selling to train themselves as good salespeople.
Then there’s the second kind of job offer for sales reps.
Here we have companies looking for sales reps to whom they’ll pay a decent fixed salary (1,000, 1,500 or 2,000 euros) plus commission. But not just any salesperson can get this kind of job.
As a rule, these companies ask for a university degree (or a higher vocational qualification) related to the sector of the product you’re going to sell, languages and so on. Sometimes they want someone with a degree even if it’s unrelated to the industry. And in many cases they require you to have worked for several years in the sector whose product you’ll be selling. With these requirements they are sometimes ruling out more than 80% of the salespeople who would be useful for the position they want to fill.
The problem I’ve seen over the years at many of these companies is simply that they don’t know what they want; or rather, they don’t know what they need. When I need an electrician, I don’t call a plumber.
Many business owners struggle to understand something very simple: selling is selling. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about selling socks, investment funds or chemicals. Everything is sold for the same reason, and exactly the same kind of underlying sales techniques are used for every single product that can be sold, without exception.
I was once talking to a private banking manager who gave me to understand that convincing someone to deposit their money with the firm was much more complicated than other kinds of selling. But that isn’t true.
Whether I’m going to put €100,000 in your hands for you to manage or I’m going to buy something else for €500, I’ll do it because I think I’m going to get a benefit. But until I see that benefit, you, as the salesperson, will have to convince me that I will see it before it actually materialises.
And one of the universal truths of selling is that a good salesperson can sell me a mediocre product, but a bad salesperson will struggle to sell me an excellent one.
In other words, if some of the sales teams that worked with me in the past had set out to sell preferentes (the preference shares at the centre of a mis-selling scandal in Spain), probably 20 times more people than actually did would have invested in them voluntarily.
Being a salesperson is a profession in its own right
One of the first companies that asked for our help with its sales department was a chemicals company on the verge of bankruptcy. They wanted a sales strategy to avoid going bust, but the first strategy we saw had to begin by cleaning up their existing sales department.
Their sales staff were highly qualified to find a cure for cancer, but certainly not very qualified to sell chemicals; in fact, not very qualified to sell anything at all.
What’s more, they lacked the motivation and energy a salesperson needs. They were listless, doing something they hadn’t studied for and waiting for the day they’d get the chance to find something better to do.
Ironically, the pay and conditions these salespeople had were really good.
Getting the owner to see this wasn’t too difficult. He said that to sell his chemical products, his salespeople needed extensive knowledge of the whole technical basis of the chemical compounds.
My argument was very clear: “I can get a salesperson to acquire all the knowledge needed to sell your products in much less time than it would take to turn your people into salespeople, because you only have to look at them to see they’re not salespeople and don’t want to work in sales.”
And to make my point crystal clear, I had to do something similar to what Leonidas did with his 300 men.
One Monday morning I gathered his team of five salespeople, all highly qualified in chemistry (or something similar), and I turned up with an established sales rep who had only finished secondary school and had 10 years of sales experience. I split the room into two sides: I sat the owner of the company and his five salespeople on one side of the table, and the salesperson I’d brought on the other.
I asked them one by one what profession they had trained for.
“I have a degree in chemistry,” said one.
“I studied pharmacy,” said another.
And so on, until I finally got to mine.
“And what’s your profession?”
“I’m a salesman,” he replied.
And it was clearly demonstrated that there were more salespeople on my side of the table than on the other.
After watching how these salespeople worked in the field, I saw several clear problems: difficulty getting potential clients to see them, more jargon than selling, and a serious problem closing the sale. But the biggest problem was that “something” they had that prevented them from creating a comfortable atmosphere between salesperson and client during visits.
And it was very hard to teach people who had no interest in learning and didn’t enjoy it. Even so, we were able to save two of the five former salespeople. With the help of the “new guy”, they were able to pair up for a while so that one handled opening doors, negotiating and closing the sale, while the other dealt with the more technical aspects of the products. At least until one had learned the technical side of the chemistry and the others had learned the basics of relationships and sales skills.
But selling isn’t just selling
And perhaps this is another part that many business owners find hard to grasp. A salesperson isn’t just someone with a set of skills for applying sales techniques. That helps, but it wouldn’t make them a complete salesperson. (Read: The day I stopped being a terrible salesman.)
A good salesperson, though it may sound like something out of a self-help book, really does have the right attitude for selling. First of all, they enjoy the sales process, they feel comfortable in front of a client, they don’t fall apart after 10 clients have turned them down, and they learn from every failed sale to perfect their techniques and arguments.
I was once asked to define the characteristics by which to recognise a good salesperson, and I replied:
“A good salesperson is someone who gets results. Sometimes even they don’t know how they do it, but they hit their targets. So, by definition, a good salesperson is a person who sells. A bad salesperson is a person who doesn’t sell.”
Fortunately, in this profession it’s very easy to tell who is competent and who isn’t: the results at the end of the month and the end of the year never lie.
Above all, a good salesperson knows that when a client says NO, it’s not because the client is an idiot or wasn’t interested; they know that, as the salesperson, they didn’t manage to reach, motivate or convince that client. Of course salespeople know they won’t be able to convince every client, but that’s what the sales P/E is for: to improve it.
So, to answer the question in the title of this article: why do companies have trouble finding good sales reps?
Simply because they make a basic first mistake: they want a sales rep, but they aren’t really looking for one.
They also start from some fallacies about the sales world
When a business owner is looking for a salesperson to sell vending machines, for example, they go as far as listing as a requirement in the job offer that the person has sold vending machines before. That approach is right in the short term but a huge blunder in the long term.
Let me explain. It’s true that someone, whether a good or bad salesperson, who already has contacts in the industry may get some initial results faster. But in many cases, having worked in an industry for years can also be counterproductive, especially if the salesperson’s previous company let its clients down, with the sales rep being the most visible face of that company’s mistakes.
By the same token, an excellent salesperson who has been successful selling, say, chemicals and encyclopaedias will end up being an excellent vending machine salesperson. It may take them more or less time, but in the long run a good salesperson will always outperform bad ones, however many years those have spent in an industry, as long as the company is willing to back them.
The question for the company would be whether it wants a temporary salesperson or a salesperson who will retire with the company and can be promoted within it.
A salesperson is a salesperson
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a medical graduate, a lawyer or someone with no qualifications. If, above all, that person is clear that they want to work in sales, their profession is salesperson or sales rep; their job, their talent, their passion is selling. And then they’ll sell trousers, shoes, investment funds and anything else where there’s a product and a potential customer.
So the only requirement you should look for when you want to hire a sales rep is that the person is a professional salesperson, forgetting many of the requirements that are asked for by default. This kind of salesperson will learn all the technical aspects of the products they need in order to sell them, whereas with a purely academic or technical profile, we can’t always promise that the person will be able to learn the necessary sales techniques. In most cases, that’s because they’re really only working in sales for lack of other career options.
It’s another matter whether that person is interested in learning this career. Because make no mistake: sales is a career and negotiation is an art, and in the absence of universities that teach them, they can only be learned on the playing field.
And that’s basically why companies have trouble hiring good salespeople: when you offer good working conditions, you aren’t looking for salespeople, and when you offer lousy conditions, good salespeople don’t accept them.
Further reading
- Seven common mistakes in negotiation and sales
- 10 tips and strategies for negotiating successfully
- The most common sales mistakes companies make, and how they hurt profits
- Seven principles for setting up a successful sale
Featured image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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