Hot-shot salesmen not always good marketers

Actually, it is something so down to earth and logical it would probably be the most deadly boring of all the business disciplines if marketing gurus didn't keep lacing it with unnecessary ambiguity and enchantment.

With the result that the unwary end up trying to make magic mountains out of marketing molehills.

Take the sales process for example.

How often does one see a company take its best salesman and make him a marketing manager, only to see him fail dismally? And conversely, it's an almost sure-fire given that good sales managers were never really much good at their jobs when they were salesmen. Mysterious? Not really - just logical human nature.

Three bad things

I remember some time ago chatting to Peter Gilbert who runs a company called Growth Partners and who would head up the Institute for Logical Marketing if such an organisation actually existed, and he reckoned that three bad things happen when you make your best sales person a manager.

"You gain a mediocre manager, you lose a great salesperson and nobody is happy."

There is, he says, a very simple and logical reason for this:

"For years the myth has been perpetuated that salespeople are made, not born. If this were true, the millions of rand spent on sales training every year would yield a bountiful crop of talented salespeople. However, this is simply not happening and many companies, notably in the IT sector, are desperately seeking 'rainmakers' who can close multi-million rand deals. Top-notch salespeople are in desperately short supply.

Innate talents

"The truth is that positions such as an entrepreneur, software designer, artist, and salesperson are based on innate talents, not training or education. This probably explains why so many organisations have dysfunctional sales teams. Because they select salespeople for their technical knowledge and not for their ability to sell. A recent advertisement for a 'senior business development manager' (read salesperson) for a specialist logistics and supply chain company required that candidates have an advanced degree in these disciplines."

The chances of finding someone with these qualifications and the ability to sell, says Gilbert, are quite slender.

"The truth is that it is much easier to teach a talented salesperson the technical skills he or she needs than it is to teach a technical person to sell. At best, sales training will improve an individual's performance by 20%. If he is 20% competent to start with, you will get to 24%. A gifted salesperson will start at 80% and a 20% improvement will take him to 96% - a far better proposition."

It doesn't get more logical than that.