Yesterday, I was speaking to bestselling author Matt Dixon about his upcoming book, The Activator Advantage. It focuses on the unique world of business development for professional service firms. Often, these companies have no designated salespeople. Rather, everyone is expected to bring in new business. The partners in particular are expected to be rainmakers.
Matt’s book is months away, and I’ll have more to share in the future. But, our conversation brought to mind my own first story about sales.
No Salespeople Here…
My first job after earning my chemical engineering degree was with a large industrial equipment maker. They made fans, pumps, pollution control equipment and similar products. My first career choice was sales, but at 19 I was told I was “too young.” (Where was DEI when I needed it?) So, I was assigned to a design and research & development team.
A few months into the job, I was sent to a multi-day training program for my specialty. I was surprised to find that I was the only attendee from an equipment maker. Everyone else was from the user side. All of the other attendees were, at least in theory, potential customers for my company’s products.
When I returned to the office, I found myself in conversation with the company’s VP of sales. He was a grizzled fellow with decades of experience in the industry. His office was filled with foot-high stacks of paper on his desk and every other horizontal surface, even the window ledges. There was enough paper in those piles to fill multiple file cabinets. It looked like a hopeless mess, but somehow he could always find the exact item he wanted in seconds.
I told him about the seminar and the technical topics they covered. I then commented, “You should send a salesperson to one of these sessions, lots of the people there might be customers.”
He studied me for a minute, and then dryly commented, “At this company, we consider EVERY employee to be a salesperson.”
Wait, I Was a Salesperson?
I felt a bit foolish after that comment. At the event, I had thought sales was someone else’s job. A job I had, in fact, been denied. But when I looked at it from the other perspective, I realized I had failed.
I might not have had the product knowledge or sales experience of the “real” salespeople, but I could have at least learned about the needs and priorities of the user companies. I could have uncovered some important pain points. I might have come back with a handful of business cards for my Rolodex.
I didn’t do any of those things. Maybe the manager who denied me the sales position knew what he was doing, I certainly didn’t seem to be a natural.
Everyone Needs To Be a Salesperson
I hadn’t thought about that incident in years, but when it came back to me, I realized that today the concept of everyone being a salesperson is more relevant than ever.
Today, regardless of their role in the company, everyone has contacts outside the firm. They may attend conferences or training events, in-person and virtual. They may network with people in similar roles at local meet-ups. They use social media.
Even people in roles that don’t involve contact with industry colleagues – say, factory workers or office cleaners – still interact with friends and family, and maybe even customers. We don’t think of the person who cleans your hotel room as a salesperson, but Ritz-Carlton empowers all their staff to spend up to $2,000 to make a guest happy, particularly when something goes wrong. Sounds a bit like sales, right? I’m sure many real salespeople wish they had that kind of flexibility.
When one of your people attends an event, will they be presenting a positive image of the company? Will they be actively looking for customer pain points or new ideas? When they meet someone who is a source of potential business or industry information, will they take the time to add that person to their contacts and follow up later?
Even those people who don’t have direct contact with customers or potential customers still interact with people in the community. Do they say what a great place it is to work, or do they complain about their boss and management? Do they take pride in the company and its products, or do they tell people they would change jobs if they could.
That doesn’t mean your people should be relentlessly pitching and promoting. That will make more enemies than friends. Rather, they should show quiet confidence in the company and its brand, and be curious about what customers really need. Every external interaction can help the company better understand its market.
Thinking Like a Salesperson
Every person in your company is in contact with customers, potential customers, industry colleagues, and/or people in the community. To maximize your company’s results, you need to get each and every employee to think like a salesperson.
Getting your people to think like salespeople may not be that hard. For me, one sentence was enough to make me realize that sales wasn’t someone else’s job.