Sales Missionary for Hire!

 

In the course of discussions with several small to mid size businesses clients on sales strategy, there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about what type of personality an organization should hire today for sales. In this article, I wanted to explore the general terms used in describing selling mentalities and how semantics and terminology used inappropriately may set the tone for the sales and marketing persona at your organization.

More specifically, I have heard several repeated questions which I wanted to highlight below:

“My sales people aren’t finding new accounts”. “Who should we hire today?” “Can you help us train our team to be more like hunters rather than farmers?”

If you have been around the sales and marketing profession for a while, you have no doubt seen these terms for addressing the type of personality profile needed for a particular sales job. If not, I have described both below:

• The Hunter is the person who gets their sales energy off of the “hunt” for the new opportunity. They are independent. They can come in very quickly into an environment generate buzz and excitement. They can close the deal. Ex. Title: Account Executive.
• The Farmer is the sales person who builds and cultivates relationships and opportunities, typically within existing accounts. Historically speaking,  they are not always good at prospecting. Ex Title. Customer Service Rep.

Suffice it to say, I despise the reference to a sales person being referred to as a  “Hunter”. Why? In my mind, it implies that the person charged with a respective sales job is out to “Kill” the prey, eat them, spit them out and then leave them for dead.

In this day and age of social media sites and information chaos, can you imagine a future customer advocate seeing this on your “Linkedin” profile page? Or, even worse seeing this on the company career section of your website? In fact, even more far reaching I believe that the term “Hunter” when used in the social selling environment today may actually turn off your potential buyers if seen in various social media outlets.

In today’s buyers market led environment, where the buyer has taken control of the sales cycle, I believe organizations should consider hiring someone who is a “Missionary Evangelist” rather than a “Hunter”.

I have defined how this applies in the context of sales below:

• The Missionary is a member of a organization who works tirelessly to convert by education and purpose. In fact, those people who come into contact with the Missionary who do not share the Missionary’s belief (CRM, Marketing Automation, ERP Software, Cloud) is the primary target of the Missionary. We need an Evangelist to convert people to a particular product or brand (ACT-ON vs. Eloqua, Salesforce.com vs. Nimble CRM) based on the beliefs, knowledge, and merits of the service/solution provided by the respective organization.

The combined terms, Missionary Evangelist, represent the type of person I believe is necessary in the art of attracting new business today. In other words, your organization requires someone today who embodies some of the following traits:

• Caring: You need someone who cares, bottom line.
• Passionate: You need someone who will go to great lengths with passion in order to find those he or she can help.
• Intelligent: You need someone who knows his or her stuff with regards to your product or service. At the right time, buyers want to be delighted by what you have to offer them.
• Listener: You need someone who will take the time to listen and provide an empathetic and caring ear.
• Communicator: You need someone who can go the mountain, so to speak, and communicate your message eloquently. This needs to be verbal and writing abilities. 

To be sure, I get the Hunter analogy. I have heard it countless times over the last two decades involved in sales and marketing. In years past, it may have been fine.  And, with profitability on the minds of every business owner, you want and need to be able find new business. It’s basic economics. However, in order to be successful today, we need to be mindful of the message we are sending to our audience  of advocates. Your buyers are more sophisticated than ever before and have information at their finger tips.

As a small midsize business owner, you have to face the facts today. The role of the professional sales person has changed. Sales and Marketing must co-exist with one another. Smarketing reigns (or whatever you call the combined enterprise of sales and marketing). Frankly speaking, today more than ever it’s Marketing’s role  to attract, educate, and move the buyers down the funnel.The Sales person’s role is to piggy back on top of the marketings education and awareness campaign to sort through the options. And, once the buyer is ready, have your Missionary, Evangelize your offering relentlessly with passion and conviction.

The term “Hunting” in the traditional sense is an “old school” way of thinking which needs to be changed in light of the new methodology of #SocialSelling and #MarketingAutomation.

You must demand and require that your organization find opportunities. But, the method and manner of doing this has changed dramatically.

With that, we must kill the “Hunter” analogy. You can begin by changing the reference in your inner circle which will begin to set a tone in your sales and marketing culture today.

Indeed, we all want to hire good people. But, you need to hire people who truly care about what you provide, can walk the talk, and have a burning desire to “help” others.

If you get that person (s) your first mission has been accomplished! Praise the Lord.