It’s time for another dose of Motivation on the Run and this week is slightly on tilt. I have a semi-rant about my take on companies and what they think of sales people. Sales people consider themselves professionals and that would be great if companies did too. I talk about how companies treat their sales people and how they require them to do things that are against the very personality trait they were hired for. You’ll just have to listen to get more details.
I also didn’t take the time to commit this episode to writing, it is extemporaneous from start to finish. In the early days, they were all that way, but lately, I spend a lot of time thinking and writing for the podcast and this week discovered something. I like the fresh of now, but I really enjoy the preparation. In fact, the preparation is as much fun for me at recording the podcast. I guess this means I need to go back to the writing next week.
[tags]motivational podcast, sales, leadership, motivation[/tags]
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Dave J. (64 comments.) // Sep 27, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Thanks for talking about salespeople. I’ve got a lot to say about it and it would be a whole lot more interesting over a beer, but here are some quick bullets:
• Based on payscale, salespeople are treated as professionals. Respect, care, & feeding are all over the chart however, as your stories told.
• There are no rules to sales.
• You can’t get a college degree in ’sales’.
• Those salespeople who are conscientious and do the right things (corporately and for the customer) aren’t always the most successful.
• Upper management’s customer-side experience with salespeople can also cause negative opinions of the profession. I ran across one today that was poor.
• The notion that salespeople are paid for what appears to be ‘easy’ work.
And finally a story. One of our new reps was visited at his home office by a former principal. The principal was amazed at the rep’s workshop and realized that he was the one who had paid for it. This outward appearance of wealth the principal could not align with the success of the salesperson, but only as money out of his pocket. That’s a sad story on a number of levels.
2 Larry Hendrick // Sep 27, 2006 at 10:13 pm
Great points, Dave. It’s something that won’t change anytime soon, either, and some of it is brought on by unscrupulous people that claim to be professionals.
One of the things I didn’t get to mention, a couple of universities are beginning to give degrees in sales. I don’t have details, yet, but it could make a big difference.
Maybe we need to start a professional organization for certifying sales professionals based on integrity and ethics. That could be interesting.
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