Are there certain types of salespeople that are beyond repair?
I’ve been thinking about the future of the selling profession quite a bit lately, for a lot of reasons. I’m not the only one, either; late last year, James Ledbetter wrote an article for Slate.com that predicted the ultimate death of the selling profession due to competition from the Internet. That article spawned a cover story for Selling Power magazine in which I was an expert panelist discussing the future of the selling profession. This week, it also spawned an article from Jeffrey Gitomer.
It’s amazing to me how many different takes there are on the future of selling. I’ll share a little bit of my own take later in this article, but I thought something Jeffrey said was interesting; he predicts the death of selling in entire industries. To quote, “There are other salespeople on the list of diminishing numbers: automobile salespeople who are being challenged by 100 years of duping customers, and the customer has finally had enough of them, pharmaceutical salespeople who are being legislated out of business for the lack of ability to build relationships with customers, and insurance salespeople, especially for lower-priced and commonly purchased policies (automobile being the best example).” That brought a question to my mind – have entire groups of salespeople doomed themselves?
In short, I think it’s possible. I’ve talked before about car salespeople in this space, and I will say again: I earned the right to say every negative word about them; I did that job for three years. I know how car salespeople are trained, managed, and unceremoniously dealt with by ownership. The idea that car salespeople as a whole, however, are doomed? I’m not sure that even I would go there. I do think that the role of car salespeople will change substantially in the next 20 years because technology will make many of them obsolete.
The other issue is that car salespeople don’t really do what is most needed by the dealers; i.e. customer acquisition and relationship building. Most dealers have one, maybe two veterans who have been there over the long haul and who have people coming in specifically to see them; however, this is by far the minority. At Noller Ford, our guy was Gene Worthington, who had sold for Noller for 26 years (at the time I was there). The problems confronting the car sales profession are many:
First of all, it’s too transient of a business. The average buy cycle of a new car buyer is 4-5 years; the average tenure of a car salesman is much, much less. That means that the average salesman hardly ever sells the same person two new cars in a row. You can’t build business that way.
Second, car salespeople don’t do much in the way of drawing people in the door. Part of this is due to a company culture that says, “When you’re not on the floor, you’re not working,” which takes away incentives for car salespeople to build value for themselves through networking and other “reach out” activities.
Finally, most salespeople are still badly trained and managed in 1950-vintage sales tactics that emphasize “control” of the customer and false fear-driven conversation. This results in a dialogue that customers aren’t anxious to repeat. Hence, car salespeople – in many cases – actually detract from the value of what they sell.
So, we circle back to my main question – is the situation irreparable? I’m honestly not sure; to prove or disprove this hypothesis would require a dealer or group of dealers who really wanted to try something different, and I’m not seeing that in the marketplace. Today, more and more customers are making their buying decisions through the Internet and dealing with customer service people at the dealerships. This is unquestionably a less-expensive practice for the dealers, and has a lot of attractiveness.
The problem is that it does nothing either to attract customers, or to build relationships, which are the main provinces of most professional salespeople. So, we have a dilemma. I will say this – I do think the “car salesman” as we know it will be a distinct minority or an endangered species in 20 years, simply because the industry will refuse to make necessary changes. The other question is, even if they do change, will the customers buy into the changes, based on the profession’s history?
Now, to my own forecast for the selling profession: Business owners and managers are looking harder and harder at their own sales dollars all the time. The salesperson of the future will have to justify their existence in terms of three key areas: Year over year profit dollar gain, new customer acquisitions, and quality and stability of customer relationships. Salespeople who cannot justify themselves in those measurements will be gone. This will necessitate a raise in the skill level of the sales profession, overall. And that’s my focus.
