The Difference Between Sales Pros and Sales Reps

POST AN ARTICLE

Featured Sales Blogs

In Partnership Wth:

DiversityJobs.com

JustJobs.com

MAIN MENU

The Difference Between Sales Pros and Sales Reps

Written by Steve Young

More Gravy
Selling Strategies - Solving the Pain or Creating a Gain

Customers make decisions emotionally and back them up with logic to justify their decisions. Our goal then is to ask the key questions that get to the heart of the decision maker and build trust and confidence leading to a long term consultative relationship. We need to be a partner to the customer and not a vendor.

Of course the answer is “it depends.” The more important question to the customer is “when it comes to investing in the solution, what’s most important to you?” That will more closely address which is more important, solving the pain or creating a gain.

Customers make buying decisions based on needs. As Miller Heiman mentions in their model, customers take action when they are in “trouble” or “growth” mode, not “even keel” or “overconfident.” So the need is generated from a problem or challenge they are facing or the potential growth or gain they are looking to achieve.

Customers also buy for both business and personal reasons. The business reason is tangible and objective, the “Result.” It’s to increase productivity, decrease operation expenses, improve market share or their competitive position. The personal reason is the “Win.” This is the intangible and subjective result which says what it will do for the decision maker. Will it give them peace of mind, a promotion or a bonus? Both business and personal reasons drive the decision, but understanding which reason might move the customer to decide is key.

In Rick Page’s book “Hope Is Not A Strategy” it says this about pain. “Pain doesn’t come from the business problem; pain comes from the political embarrassment of the business problem.” I believe this is so true. Customers don’t make decisions until the pain hurts to a point that it must be alleviated, which includes their own embarrassment for not taking action. Pain needs to be heightened from both the business and personal perspective. We need to explore with the customer which need is hurting the most. Pain is a present existing condition, which is easier to address than exploring potential gains, which is a promise in the future. Rick also says that to create a sense of urgency to close business, we must creatively take the invisible costs and make them visible and politically painful. In other words we must put a price on the customer’s procrastination. Giving out more price cuts or discounts doesn’t create a sense of urgency to buy unless it’s for a stereo system on sale just for the day! With complex sales situations emotional issues usually override cost justifications.

I agree with Rick Page that emotional and political problems drive buying activity more than logical ones. That’s why we scratch our heads when our pipeline forecasts look like a cloudy weather report. Customers make decisions emotionally and back them up with logic to justify their decisions. Our goal then is to ask the key questions that get to the heart of the decision maker and build trust and confidence leading to a long term consultative relationship. We need to be a partner to the customer and not a vendor. Vendors sell hot dogs. When we become a trusted partner the promise of the “gain” in our solution becomes a reality to the customer based on their confidence and our track record to deliver.

We should always prepare questions prior to our meeting with a customer which can gain us credibility and earn us the right to continue down the path to winning the sale. Most sales people don’t ask the tough questions since it will ruin a perfectly good forecast. Some example questions that I like to use to engage the customer are:

How have these issues impacted your business?
What are the critical success factors you expect from the solution?
What is most important to you for this project?
What other impacts might this problem have on your business?
What do you see as the benefits in solving the problem?
For you personally what’s most important?

These are some examples of some pain and gain questions that can help us to dig deeper into the real issues the customer is facing from both a business and personal perspective. Asking our customers better questions gives us better answers and a leg up on our competition.

Good selling!

The basic premise of most sales models is that Sales is a “numbers game." The numbers pertain to a volume of leads, sales calls, and potential sales fed into a sales funnel (or pipeline). Contained within the sales funnel is the company's sales cycle, the steps involved in order to close, or convert, a potential sale into an actual sale. Best practices, action plans, and differentiation are rudimentary concepts that are, in their respective function within classic American sales practices, among the basic pillars for advancing sales. The predominant focus of the methodology and its numerous variations is on its product—sales.

Sales professionals are among a business owner’s greatest assets. These talented and tenacious individuals advance the frontline, separating a business owner from greater sales. Their work is vital for realizing and maintaining greater and greater success. Unfortunately, these individuals are becoming increasingly difficult to find. The occupation of selling is changing through the influx of sales representatives.

In recent years, the sales occupation has sustained a different kind of salesperson, which I refer to as the sales representative. While there are several types of salespeople, there are but two fundamental classifications of salesperson—the sales professional and the sales representative. The difference between these groups is important for business owners and sales managers to understand, especially if they are interested in growing a business by acquiring new accounts.

Most business owners and sales managers cannot distinguish a sales rep from a sales pro. Unlike other professions such as accounting, the profession of sales is not formalized; there is no required certification process, and therefore, no criteria defining the differences between the levels of proficiency existing among those in the profession. While these two groups—reps and pros—perform many of the same functions, the differences between them account for many of the problems business owners have in growing their businesses.

Drawing the Line
The difference between sales reps and sales pros can be expressed in terms of a degree of quality. Sales reps will present your products and services to prospective customers, identity, qualify, and follow-up on sales opportunities. They will create presentations, schedule sales meetings, and, in the process, occasionally receive a sale. The sales of the representative are incidental to their work, which is more mindless (as of a routine) than it is mindful (as if engaged in to ensure the fulfillment of an objective).   By contrast, the sales of the professional are orchestrated results of his/her work, which is thoughtfully pursued with the intent of achieving a specific result.

Vision, preparedness, investment, and skill provide categories for good examples that can more clearly highlight the differences between sales reps and sales pros.

Vision
There are several main objectives in most sales sequences, including finding and qualifying prospective clients, scheduling appointments with prospective clients, profiling and identifying leveraging points, clarifying urgency to buy, and obtaining next-step commitments with a prospect. As selling becomes complex, additional steps are required in order to achieve a sale. Identifying and having a vision of the often arcane, prospect-specific steps can challenge a salesperson. And an initial vision must often adapt in order to accommodate new steps as they arise in the pursuit of sales.

Sales reps lack vision. They give little or no thought to modifying general sales procedures. Sales reps are not concerned with maximizing the effectiveness of their endeavors, though they say otherwise. Sales professionals consistently strive to gain insight and advantages into sales situations and opportunities to ensure the success of their mission to convert potential sales into actualized sales.

Sales reps can develop their vision and improve their sales by thinking more deeply, questioning, not settling with their assumptions, and reasoning the “why,” “how,” and “what” beyond the ostensible. This thinking process accounts for the main difference between many sales successes and failures.

Preparedness
The basics of preparedness for most sales pursuits are: (1) having a breadth and depth of knowledge about the prospect and the sales opportunities the prospect represents; (2) strong leveraging points; (3) anticipation of a prospect’s responses to your presentation, and consideration of any peripheral issues that could impact achieving the sale; (4) a step-by-step vision for securing the sale; (5) a fallback approach for reengaging a waning prospect. Sales professionals are prepared to engage and nurture sales opportunities. Sales representatives mindlessly go through the motions of call, meet, and follow-up without sufficient preparation. Sales is a numbers game for the sales representative who hopes that eventually something will come from “all of my work.”

Preparing a salesperson to engage in a sales pursuit requires an investment of time and materials from the business owner. If the business owner or sales manager isn’t supporting her salespeople in the activities essential for selling in today’s world, both the business and the rep will typically lose in competitive selling situations involving competition that is better prepared.

Sales representatives can improve their preparedness by asking and answering for themselves questions such as:

1. What data might help me engage and intrigue my prospect?
2. What is the main objective of my meeting with this prospect?
3. What possible issues might be influencing my prospect’s buying decision?
4. How can I create desire for my product in my prospect?
5. What questions might my prospect ask me and how will I answer?
6. What hurdles can I anticipate between where the sale is now and finalizing the sale?
7. How will my presentation help my prospect understand the value I offer?

Investment
A sales rep rarely considers what his/her sales pursuits cost his/her employer. Profitability is not a consideration for the reps who see a sale simply as a sale, and their investment in any sales work as valuable. Sales professionals are more valuable to employers and will consistently outperform sales reps by simply knowing where and how to invest their skills. Professionals know which prospects to pursue, when and why a sales pursuit should be abandoned, how to negotiate and achieve profitable transactions, and strive to improve their skills in order to maximize profits from their endeavors.

Sales representatives can improve their value as a salesperson by periodically questioning themselves:

1. Am I on-track for reaching my goals, and, if not, how will I change that status?
2. What overall value does this sales pursuit represent to me and my employer?
3. What priority should I give this pursuit in helping achieve my goals?
4. How does the work I’m doing right now rank in helping me achieve my goals?
5. What can I do in order to increase my productivity and ensure reaching my goal?

Skills
Salespeople must develop a multitude of skills in order to consistently bring sales opportunities to fruition. Sales reps often neglect developing their skills. Sales representatives and sales professionals, therefore, vary to the extent that they diverge in possessing the skills required to sell most effectively.

Consider the components of most sales work and their respective demands:

Conducting research     Requires resourcefulness and creativity
Qualifying                      Requires logic, and breadth and depth of specific (industry) knowledge
Setting appointments    Requires technique proficiency, discernment, and assertiveness
Presenting                     Requires strategy formulation, positioning, and presentation skills
Nurturing business         Requires patience, resourcefulness, persistence, creativity, and subtlety

Selling professionally requires a multitude of skills working synergistically. Those possessing such skills become top performers. Most people employed in sales, however, do not improve their skills, and thus, remain ill equipped to succeed consistently. Developing the appropriate sales skills will improve one’s effectiveness in selling. When striving to improve the sales of your company, understand which skills are required to meet your specific challenges. And do not expect equal results from sales methodologies. Understand the rationale behind what you are practicing, and require the same exercise form your salespeople.

The greatest sales skill that you can develop is the depth of your thinking. Sales professionals are deep thinkers about sales situations and, therefore, are more capable of figuring out how to effectively manage those situations in order to achieve success.

Steve Young
		About the author:
		Steve Young is a nationally respected, “outside the box” sales expert who is President of ESM4, Inc. and founder of IDEAL Sales. After twenty-five plus years of sales experience working with companies as visible as Chevron, as prestigious as the production firm for the Oscars and Emmys, and numerous Fortune-ranked corporations, Steve created IDEAL Sales, the next-generation sales solutions resource for business owners and sales managers. Steve has written articles published by the world’s largest online sales communities and is author of the book IDEAL Sales.