All work & no play

Entrepreneur, August, 2002 by Mark Henricks

"A lot of salespeople tried to hit holes-in-one," says Stephan Schiffman, CEO of sales consulting firm DEI Management in New York City. "There was a time when you could do that. But now you have to go back to the process and be good at it," adds Schiffman, the author of many sales books, including one he considers particularly appropriate to today's selling environment, Make It Happen Before Lunch: so Cut-to-the-Chase Strategies for Getting the Business Results You Want (McGraw-Hill).

Developing and executing a sales process can takes a while. Eighteen months ago, an opportunity that did not pan out after four to six weeks would have been labeled a low priority. "A sales cycle of three to four months is now mainstream," Schiffman says.

Salespeople can't expect golf outings and other forms of entertainment to yield rapid results--or that time-pressed clients will even accept such offerings. "Entertainment is on the wane," says Schiffman. "Unless there's already a relationship, taking someone to lunch doesn't serve a purpose."

It may take twice as many contacts to close a sale today, says McClennan. And surprisingly, both entrepreneurs and experts agree sellers can't always shortcut the process by just dropping the price.

"The old method of selling by price is falling by the wayside," explains Dennis Kyle, a sales consultant with Positive Results in Avon lake, Ohio. "Organizations are willing to pay more if the product's value is evident. They won't pay a dollar for anything if they don't see the value."

In the Now

It looks as if the future of selling resembles the distant past more than recent history. If there is a theme to this new selling environment, it's this: back to basics. "The philosophy of going in and finding out what customers need dates back to 1980," says Schiffman. "Now they're returning to what worked years ago, which is seeing people and establishing relationships."

One major difference between 1980 and today is the Net. Some see it will play a major role in one shift: that is, to deploy salespeople only to those accounts identified as having the biggest potential. The rest will move to less costly Web-based sales interfaces. "The top accounts are going to get the attention and the others, unfortunately, aren't," says Kieran.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs forced to cope with the effects of September's terror and the 2001 recession are now looking on the bright side. They've dusted off sales tricks they haven't tried in years. And they're not sorry. 'The marketplace dictated we do this," says McClennan. "I wish we had done it a lot sooner."

RELATED ARTICLE: TAKE A CLOSER LOOK

When sales are hard to come by, experts arid entrepreneurs recommend hiring more salespeople. Luckily, there are more available today than there were a few years ago--although the market is a long way from being loose. But you have to look beneath the surface of today's sales job applicant. Internet companies and telecommunications firms, two hot-growth industries of the late 1990s, are the source of many of the unemployed salespeople available now. Try to keep that in mind when you are scanning applicants, warns New York City sales consultant Stephan Schiffman. "I see these resumes where they increased the company's sales by 100 percent. But anybody could in those days. The thing to ask now is, 'Could they do it today?'"