Sellers Sell!
Years ago working with a chain of retail stores, I interviewed the salespeople. After a lot of talk with a lot of people I found out that they really hated to close a sale because the work they had to do after making the sale was so time‐consuming and difficult.
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Why? One of the owners was very obsessive about details. He had provided a job description and list of tasks to the salespeople that meant that every sale was followed by hours of paperwork and follow-up.
The result was that salespeople who were not compensated based on their actual sales and who did not receive any incentives or commissions spent a lot of time talking to customers and even encouraging them to study the products and take their time about making a decision. The salespeople hated to make a sale.
Around the same time, Arthur Martinez, the president of Sears, was struggling to solve a sales problem. He commissioned an industrial engineering firm to study the Sears salespeople in the stores.
What did the engineers find? Breaking down the activities of the salespeople, the industrial engineers found 225 different activities performed by Sears salespeople.
Martinez was shocked and appalled. What was all of this“ stuff”? They reviewed everything and determined that more than 200 of the activities had nothing to do with making a sale or keeping a customer.