What’s the DNA of your sales team, corporate or carnival?
As the BrandBuilder stated recently,
“Be true to your own nature. There’s no point in faking it. A golden retriever isn’t a chihuahua or a pug or a greyhound, and for good reason. Being comfortable in your own skin is 90% of the trick to rocking out your life . . . Find yourself and embrace your nature. That’s always a great place to start.”
In other words, your sales team is the sum of your organization’s DNA.
And if your sales DNA isn’t based on mutual respect, what is it based on?
One of the biggest challenges about being part of an inside sales organization, or any sales organization for that matter, is the ongoing public perception of the sales community at large.
To the general public, sales feels like a “dirty word.” It’s connotatively negative, drawing up images of used car lots, unkempt slobs saddled with headsets lining endless rows of soulless cubicles. It’s the carnival sideshow huckster, the over-the-top TV ads so ill-conceived that we’d rather change the channel than see it/hear it/watch it.
Our company thinks about this constantly. How we define ourselves here at InsideSales.com defines how we interact with our customers.
And I often wish that our simple, easy, definition of inside sales—”the act of selling remotely”—was unhindered by the excess baggage the sales and marketing industries have saddled it with over the last 40 years.
But it’s not.
And you know what? It doesn’t matter.
Sales is our DNA. Analyzing the processes of sales and marketing, and making it better, easier, and faster for business professionals is what we do. If there’s one thing we want to know, to understand, to grasp so fully that we can make our clients’ lives better, it’s the process of sales. Or more appropriately, the process of sales done the right way.
We want to know it better than anyone else because that’s what our clients expect of us. We do our marketing research because we want to know better than anyone else how the real process of sales works. Because that’s how we change the public’s perception of sales from being something unwholesome, parasitic, to seeing it as something vital, a respected piece of the business process.
Sales pros just want respect. Respect for the hard, essential, company-defining work that they do.
And hopefully, in some measure, the work we do, the products and services we provide, are helping do that.
So what’s in your DNA?
2 Comments
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As the saying goes, it’s not the company that makes a person.. it’s the people who make the company. I agree with you and would simply add, you need to respect yourself first in order to be able to give it to others.- this means being honestly concerned for the welfare of each and every peron; every minute, every hour, every day. This will have a ripple effect throughout the entire company and will extend to customers and change the very DNA of the company. It’s very simple- you cannot give what you do not have – - so you have to start from within. http://bit.ly/ayeen
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It is an interesting phenomenon.
Why is sales and marketing so hard these days? Is it because there really aren’t compelling products, brands, services, and people who could really benefit from them?
No, it’s that there are so many mediocre-to-poor products and brands clamoring for the same amount of interest. We’ve been trained to simply tune out so much that we resist every attempt to reach us, even when it’s valid.
