The Science of Sales: is it Art, Science, or Scam?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Oct 18, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Lots of times, when I’m delivering my inside sales training courses, people in my classes ask me to recommend books on Sales. There are a bunch of good ones, and not all of them are current, because, to a very large extent, the study of sales is the timeless study of human nature combined with the study of what creates profit and loss for businesses. There you have it, ROI selling (if you haven’t read my whitepaper on that subject, you might want to take a look, and it’s free).
I’m a voracious reader, but I don’t recommend sales books all that often. The blog you’re reading now is essentially a sales manual in itself. But this week, I finished a book written in 2004 by Walter A. Friedman, called Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America, and if you’re a student of sales, you just might want to buy it. Although the writing style is a bit pedantic, the book describes the fascinating course of the history of Sales in North America, beginning with itinerant preachers, clock salesmen, and tinsmiths, leading up to the present day.
Some of more fascinating issues in the book are on the subject of making a science out of selling. For more than 100 years, people have tried to create predictive models of what constitutes a great sales person (so companies might be able to hire more “intelligently”), and of how to sell to a specific type of buyer. One of my favorite early concepts developed by psychologists-in-service-to-industry was that of phrenology, in which the size and shape of the prospect’s head was believed to be an indicator of character, and a clue to how best to sell to him or her. Or how about the work of Katherine Blackford, who posited that one would be more successful selling to fair-skinned people by using intelligent arguments, and achieve best results with darker-skinned individuals by providing product demonstrations that would allow buyers to “touch and test” first. These, and similar concepts, while considered Science in their day, have since been discredited. And any company buying into those concepts as a sales training methodology would have been essentially buying into a scam.
Today, I still see a lot of sales training ideas that I personally think are hokum, from psychological testing for sales reps to the belief that determining a prospect’s core personality trait (as if there ever was one) has any value in the sales process. What Friedman’s book does point out is that in any era, many ideas that are thought to hold great value in the absence of intelligent skepticism turn out later to be absolute hogwash.
Not all of you reading this post will be trained by me, but in seeking a training solution, please keep your skeptical eyes and ears tuned up. In our era, for instance, there’s still a lot of New Age mysticism out there that’s ending up in sales training courses. So if you hear of a sales concept that you’re unfamiliar with, or doesn’t sound like it makes sense, take a couple of minutes and search the internet for the term, and you might be surprised at what you find.
I always say that our prospects and customers tend to be skeptical themselves, especially of salespeople. I also think these folks end up being our best customers, precisely because they are smart and are in learning mode every day. So if you want a good read that underscores what I’ve been discussing today, and how some traditional ideas of Sales have been and continue to be used, I’d recommend Friedman’s book. It’s a terrific history of our industry, and puts today’s sales concepts in an interesting and compelling perspective.