Want
There are companies that create products or services that everybody wants. Well, maybe not everybody but many: apple, red bull, Chanel, Porsche, etc. The strange thing is that most of those who want their products do not need it. But still, they would pay lots of money, queue for hours or wait for months to get those products. Just because they want it. The companies do not sell the products but like one dealers said to me: Ferrari are neither bought nor sold. They are distributed to some hand-picked then, well, owners.
Need
Then there are products or services that people don’t really desire, yet, they need them. So somebody has to approach them and sell them. Insurance is one of them.
Margins
The WANT-business produces margins way higher than the NEED- business. People show happily the WANT-products and brands and they would never want to be associated with the NEED-products.
Just in case, you need to sell…
We tend to think and visualize growth as a straight line going up. It looks good. It seems to make sense. At least in the western cultures, something that goes from bottom left to upper right, looks positive. But the reality is often different.
Company’s owners and investors expect profit that ideally goes up over time.
In the best case, growing the topline leads to higher profit. If so, the bottom line is: you have to sell more. Sales people shall generate growth and most of the time they do. Yet, the growth line is rarely a straight line that goes from the lower left to the upper right. In reality, it is like moving around in a labyrinth of many borders, walls, silos and spaces.
There are the guys who define business model strategy. The other team is designing the partner strategy. A couple of creative people work on product and service offering. And some smart talents calculate the best prices and margins.
As it often happens in parallel, the sales people have to act in-between several different worlds. Their own universe needs to include all the other dimensions. In fact, when they face a potential client, all the other worlds come together. For good or for bad.
So they have to translate the inner complexity of the organization into a sales pitch and turn it into a revenue. If they don’t, everybody tends to blame them.
That is unfair.
ARE YOUR SALES PEOPLE TRANSLATORS OR SELLERS?
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