The following ten laws must be observed.

1. Gather all necessary intelligence before formulating strategy. 

Never act without thinking and assessing all of the available accurate information. A strategy is only as good as the information that leads to it. Being an excellent climber is of no benefit if your ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Social research tools such as Linked are essential.

2. Be first and set the agenda. 

Being strategic is best achieved by arriving first and setting the agenda with senior stakeholders. Truly understand the organisational dynamics and winning agendas aligned to the biggest problems or opportunities. Influence the requirements toward your own unique value and set an agenda that disadvantages the competition. Focus on helping them define the very value you bring and set an agenda around the importance of managing risk.

3. Start high in the account and be a domain expert business person. 

You will always be delegated to people you sound like. Be a business person rather than a sales person by discussing their industry and business challenges and opportunities. Ensure your LinkedIn profile supports this and be equipped to discuss how your have helped others to overcome similar challenges or realize significant opportunities. Have proof of your claims. Avoid discussing features and functions of products, services or solutions.

4. Find and influence the ‘puppet master’. 

This will be a senior person in the background who seeks to avoid meeting with sales people. They will only engage if they believe you have gravitas, relevant insight and genuine value. Initial influence or establishing credibility can often be achieved indirectly through third-parties, and this is why your LinkedIn credentials and network are so important.

5. Understand the informal power-base and politics. 

The organisational chart can be misleading and it is essential to understand the power-base and influence-dynamics that transcend the visible structure. Relationship mapping is an essential part of opportunity and account planning… you cannot formulate effective strategy or align with the ‘power players’ without it.

6. Align to serious problems, significant opportunities and winning agendas. 

The only person who can call it a solution is the customer. Problem solving must occur before solution selling, and the size of the customer’s purchase order is directly linked to the size of the problem being solved or the opportunity being addressed. Understand the business-case and real value of investing in your product, service or solution. Only the customer can quantify the value.

7. Think before acting and be patient and strategic. 

Tactical mistakes can usually be recovered but strategic errors are often fatal. Never be afraid of waiting and always be willing to invest in gathering additional information. Do not confuse laziness, inaction or procrastination with being strategically patient. Be humble and seek advice while thinking through the potential consequences of actions. Only birds are good at ‘winging it’.

8. Identify and manage risk. 

Bad news early is good news. Risk resides in what you cannot control and especially from ignorance. In the software industry risk resides in demonstrations and ‘reference sites’. Across all industries, risk also resides in people and competitors. Anyone on your team afflicted by arrogance or an inability to listen and be briefed represents enormous risk. Beware therefore of your own executives who seek to interact with your prospect because they can easily say something damaging or introduce unwanted information. Existing customers are the greatest potential sales resource if they act as positive references but they can easily be a liability in highlighting your deficiencies and this is often the case the lower you interact in an organisation.

9. Anticipate competitor moves and set traps. 

Know your competition and their methods of operation so that you can constantly change the rules. Do not allow them to use your weaknesses against you. Instead set traps for them and ensure you have set an agenda focused on your unique value. Ensure the customer publicizes your winning selection early and widely therefore making it difficult for competitors to interfere once they deduce they’ve lost.

10. Confidence is the paradise of fools. 

Confidence is usually the feeling you have before you understand the situation. Avoid arrogance and complacency. Be positively paranoid (competitively aware) yet not defensive or cynical. Take nothing for granted and validate any assumptions. Respect the customer and their power of choice at all times. Never underestimate the competition or the way in which circumstances can alter through changes in personnel, market conditions, acquisitions, and myriad other factors.

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• Relationship Selling – Develop strong trust-based relationships to encourage buyers to make a commitment (1990’s – Mike Bosworth)
• Solutions Selling – Work with customers to develop a mutual understanding of the solutions that would be a best fit (2000’s)
• Challenger Sale – Challenge customers to think differently while controlling the sales process (2011 – The Corporate Executive Board)

1990s to 2000s

Mike Bosworth began his career in 1972 with Xerox and from 1976 to 1982 was the primary architect and deliverer of Xerox sales training – PSS. In 1983, Bosworth founded his company Solution Selling – a sales training organisation. In 1993 he published Customer Centric Selling, proposing a solutions orientation to sales. Like Needs Satisfaction and SPIN, this version of solution selling proposed a number of distinct phases:

1. Pre-call planning and research
2. Stimulating interest
3. Establishing the critical business issues
4. Mapping the organisation
5. Negotiating access to senior decision-makers
6. Managing the product evolution
7. Negotiating
8. Closing

The flaw in this version of solution selling is that it’s not “solution selling” oriented. Phase 6 “Managing the product evolution” indicates that this system is still about the product, solution selling is not. What research has shown is that Solution Selling is about how customers view solutions, not how salespeople define them. In fact, all of the methods that support real Solution Selling encourage salespeople to work with their customers to gain an understanding of what the customer believes is an ideal fit solution.

As in the Blue Sheet approach used by Miller Heiman in Strategic Selling, solutions salespeople are expected to master a process for establishing strategic alignment between themselves and the buyer by going through the visioning process model described above.

Since the 1990s sales organisations have been bombarded with a host of methodologies; almost all of them shades of either PSS (Needs Satisfaction Selling) or SPIN (Consultative Selling).

2010s

Now we have many different sales specialists, consultants, psychologists and academics all working closely with salespeople and customers with the purpose of trying to identify what is really required in the world of selling.

No one individual that we could find can lay claim to being the parent (or founder) of Solution Selling. Equally important, not one authority can lay claim to having identified the perfect solution selling proposition. It’s been a process of synthesis and observation, trial and error but most importantly, it’s been the observation and the discussions with customers that has finally resulted in the realities of solution selling today.

Historically, customers needed salespeople. Initially they needed salespeople to inform them because they had little access to information. They also had limited choice. Over the last century, but more particularly, over the last decade or so, the same customers have been overwhelmed with information. They don’t need salespeople to provide information, they need salespeople to help them wade through the masses of available information to find the salient facts and identify the best fit solution.

Salespeople are no longer purveyors of the latest news about the latest gadgets, inventions and ideas. They certainly aren’t necessarily the first port of call for customers who are looking for a particular solution to a pressing challenge. They most definitely are not even a consideration for the purchase of commoditised items that require little technical knowledge or understanding.

In this paradigm the role of the sales professional has changed. Now, even more than when the concept was first developed in the 1970s, salespeople have to be consultative. They need to be business people who can sell, rather than salespeople who understand business. They need to have the skills to establish and fast track trusted relationships with a range of decision-makers in the variety of organisations with which they work.

One need only spend a week in the field, meeting with customers to know the game has changed. Sales strategies and tactics that worked well in the not too distant past, are no longer enough. Yes, salespeople should bring ideas to customers to help them grow their business and solve business problems. That’s nothing new. That was proposed as the underlying premise of PSS in 1968; by Miller Heiman (Strategic Selling) in the late 1970s, by Neil Rackham (SPIN) in the 1980s; by Mike Bosworth in the 1990s (Customer Centric Selling) and even by Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People – 1938).

Perhaps the closest to a revolution in selling since the 1968-1970s metamorphosis was the evolution of Solution Selling around 2000 – a method that evolved as a result of customer demands and expectations that forced sales professionals to re-think their approach.

The over-load of information, access to massive choice of hardly differentiated products and services (even at a complex level), and the increase in influence that buyers had on sales, coupled with pressure to reduce costs and improve profits of the buying organisations, forced salespeople to open up, share control of the sales and partner with customers to identify real and meaningful solutions.

In this era, buyers were (and still are) willing to identify preferred vendors, supplies and service providers, but they expect them to be more flexible. They want their suppliers to invest in understanding their business imperatives and then develop solutions that deliver more profits at both lower cost and less risk. Customers, not salespeople, define a solution and sales learned quickly that it would either adapt to this new environment or perish.

Solution Selling is a sales method that has been, and continues to be, driven by customer demands.

In November 2011 Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson published The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. This book rapidly became a bestseller based on the premise that sales success isn’t just about building relationships with customers, it is also about challenging them. Authors of the book, Dixon and Adamson, studied thousands of sales representatives, across an array of industries around the US. This conclusion validated what David Ogilvy (1911–1999), the advertising guru responsible for developing relationship marketing as a concept, said back in the early 1990s, that relationships opened the door and gave the salesperson an opportunity to pitch their argument. Relationships even allowed the salesperson and sales organisation to make a mistake or two. Because a relationship existed the salesperson was given a second chance. But “in and of itself” (Ogilvy quotations) relationships won’t generate business…”

The Challenger Sale also says that the model shouldn’t just be a sales process but rather a company-wide initiative that incorporates other functional areas including marketing, product development, manufacturing and strategy, which is what Peter Drucker referred to in his book The Age of Discontinuity (1953): Organisations keen on being customer focused needed to adapt their approach to helping their customers realise their goals and objectives. “The purpose of business is to satisfy the customer’s needs. The consequence of satisfying customer needs, is making a profit.”

According to the authors (of The Challenger Sale), to sell in a business-to-business context solutions salespeople must approach customers with unique insights that show them how they can save or make money, as it was stated by PSS, in the way of pushing salespeople to introduce benefits in the form of dollars that could be created or saved, and later Strategic Selling (Miller Heiman – 1995) which stressed the importance of selling dollars earned or saved.

The Challenger Sale also recommends that instead of a bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about the company and products, salespeople should tailor their sales message to the customer’s specific needs and objectives. This reflects what the Fuller Brush company did in 1928 with its massive door-to-door sales force and powerful sales management led by Albert Teetsel. Teetsel told salespeople not to overwhelm housewives with too many facts about the different brushes they had to offer. “Quickly establish what the best brush would be for the housewife and then stick to the basic feature of making the house cleaning easier and quicker, giving the lady of the house time to enjoy listening to the radio. Facts and figures only confuse customers”, said Teesel.

This sales methodology also recommends that salespeople should be more assertive pushing back when necessary in taking control of the sale. This advice was shown to be flawed by Miller Heiman in Strategic Selling, Mike Bosworth in Customer Centric Selling and even Neil Rackham in SPIN, simply because customers do not like to be antagonised, and certainly resist being controlled.

That doesn’t mean that salespeople have to be wimps. Customers expect salespeople to have strong views. They want salespeople to understand the world in which they are operating, and to have sufficient confidence in their own organisation and the solutions they are proposing, to put up some argument based on a valid business reason. But they don’t expect salespeople to try to manipulate them.

The Challenger Sale defines the attributes of successful salespeople. But, the logic is somewhat flawed. For example, by attempting to present salespeople who are good at relationship building as being too supportive and too generous with their time, as opposed to what they identify as the “ideal” – The Challenger – who loves to debate.

Challenger Salespeople do several things that, according to the authors, make them different and successful: they always have a different view of things, they love to debate, they love to control the sales call, they understand the customer’s business and they push their customers.

However:
• If a salesperson didn’t have a different point of view, what would be the reason for a prospect to meet with them? If all the salesperson has to offer is already known, then the buyer can more cost-effectively do their own research.
• If a salesperson is simply going to meet with customers to prove a point (debate) they are more likely to get thrown out of the meeting, unless the discussion is on equal terms with both buyer and seller sharing opinions with neither striving for one-upmanship.
• And if salespeople still believe they can control the sales call they are living in a fools-paradise. Customers are equal partners in the sale. They share the interaction and would never allow salespeople to control them – the risks are just too high.
• But if salespeople fail to push their customers, if they fail to come up with concepts, ideas and solutions that are radical, then they are offering pedestrian solutions, usually undifferentiated and hardly enough to excite discerning buyers.

What customers do strenuously resist today is dealing with salespeople who know it all; salespeople who attempt to take control or confront decision-making processes.

Customers, particularly in the Australian market and increasingly worldwide, are looking for a collaborative approach to buying and selling, where they can work with sales professionals who bring their in-depth knowledge and understanding of how solutions can be applied and who work with their customers who also have an in-depth knowledge of their own business and challenges. The two – buyer and seller – work collaboratively, in partnership, to develop solutions that deliver the greatest effectiveness and improved efficiency, with the least possible risk at a total cost of ownership that is bearable and justifiable.

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 1 (1900 -1950s)

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 2 (late 1950s – 1980s)

The post The History of Sales Methodology – Part 3 (1990s – 2010’s) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

• Formula / AIDA Selling – Use the same, fixed approach to get Attention, Interest, Desire and Action (1950s – David Ogilvy).
• Needs Satisfaction Selling – 7 step process to uncover needs and introduce benefits (1968 – Don Hammalian and Xerox Corporation).
• Strategic Selling – Use fixed planning process to highlight danger areas and penetrate decision-making process (1970s – Miller Heiman).
• Consultative Selling – Use in-depth questioning techniques to understand customer pain and then consult by helping buyer see impact for themselves (1980’s – Neil Rackham).

Late 1950’s – 1980’s

Towards the latter part of the 1950s salespeople were struggling. Although competition was not as intense as it is today, in a post-war society where factories were overproducing, merely to take up slack in their factory production, there was more product than buyers. Many organisations turned to marketing for assistance. And one of the major recommendations from marketing was to develop niche markets in order to enable sales to focus more effectively on potential buyers. The marketing argument was that if organisations clustered buyers into homogeneous segments – where their needs and behaviour were similar, if not totally identical – sales could develop a formula that would deliver greater success.

Formula Selling is a standardised (canned) approach to selling, based on a fixed sequence of steps, such as that outlined in the very popular “AIDA process”, which does not permit any variation due to changed circumstances or innovative ideas.

AIDA – which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – is the acronym for the standardised protocol used by salespeople to grab the Attention of a prospect, encourage an Interest in what the salesperson had to offer, stimulate a Desire to buy and then generate an Action which was committing to making a purchase. Although it became prevalent in the 1950s, Formula Selling is still very much in use today by telesales operators in call centres around the world. And AIDA still works in a simple and uncomplicated sales situation, where
the buyer is relatively uninformed and with products or services that are essentially commoditised.

1968

Perhaps the most important evolution in selling took place in 1968 with the development of Needs Satisfaction Selling by Xerox Corporation of the United States.

Interestingly, the stimulus for this revolutionary sales methodology was the need to provide support and assistance to Xerox salespeople who were starting to lose deals to competition, as the Xerox patent on dryphotocopying came to an end.

Investing more than $10 million Xerox developed this powerful sales methodology and sales training programme – a concept that has influenced all training and sales methodologies ever since. The essence of this sales method was that almost nobody wanted to be sold anything. However, people did want to make informed decisions and it was the responsibility of professional salespeople to be in a position to a) understand what customers wanted, and b) be competent in explaining how the benefits of a product would help customers make that informed decision.

Needs Satisfaction Selling was the first structured sales process designed to facilitate the buyer’s decision-making process and assist salespeople overcome some of the resistance prospective customers may have and, at the same time, build stronger working relationships. The phenomenal success of the Xerox method of selling led the organisation to commercialise the concept. Xerox formed a new company (Xerox Learning Systems – XLS) in 1972 with the purpose of selling its sales method and training, known as Professional Selling Skills (PSS), together with a range of other sales development programmes (including speed reading, customer service skills, sales management and interviewing skills).

Don Hammalian who, along with Neill Rackham, was the co-author of PSS explained that at the time Xerox Corporation developed the sales method, it was looking for some way in which it could teach Xerox salespeople to sell solutions in what was rapidly becoming a complex, price sensitive and competitive environment. However, Hammalian did admit that in its initial iterations PSS was a highly manipulative model that was product focused and not one that should be advocated today.

Accepting that the number of steps in the sales method was somewhat arbitrary, Hammalian is justifiably proud that PSS / Needs Satisfaction Selling was the first programme of its type that introduced a sales philosophy, methodology and that was supported with a clear set of skills that could be learned using what was then the latest method in adult learning – Linear Learning.

This process, developed by Xerox and still very much in play today, includes the following seven stages:

1. Planning the sales call
2. Introduce yourself / company and start the sales call
3. Asking questions and probing for insight into the prospect’s business
4. Introduce benefits that would satisfy the needs of the customer
5. Identify and handle objections and other buyer attitudes (scepticism
   and indifference)
6. Close the deal and negotiate terms
7. Follow up the call to ensure customer satisfaction

Since the commercialisation of Needs Satisfaction Selling (in PSS) in the 1970s more and more organisations have introduced different selling techniques, with supporting methodologies, styles and most importantly, training. In fact, one of the major differences between pre and post Needs Satisfaction Selling is that the sales methods developed prior to PSS were attempts (even if they were flawed) at finding ways to improve sales by improving methodologies. Post PSS the development of new sales methods seem to be more like sales training programmes.

Mid 1970s

Although by the mid-1970s customers were really enjoying the power of being better informed and having more choice, there was some gloom on the horizon. OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) became a real threat to the global economy with its grip on oil prices that saw oil prices jump from a low of $3 to $12 a barrel, increasing production and transport costs and making buyers more risk averse, more cautious and at the same time, more demanding.

In response to the additional pressure salespeople faced Robert Miller (Kepner Tregoe Consulting) and Stephen Heiman (a former IBM salesman) introduced Strategic Selling.

Strategic Selling was an approach that provided salespeople, already equipped with the basic skills propagated by PSS, with the tools for planning and managing large and complex accounts. Strategic Selling added very little to sales processes, though it did introduce a methodology of planning for large and complex accounts. The methodology that underpins the Strategic Selling approach is, however, flawed, given that no actual skillset was outlined in order to enable salespeople to change their behaviour from product focused selling to complex, consultative selling in large and key accounts.

1980s to early 1990s

One of the more successful sales methodologies that evolved after Needs Satisfaction Selling, was Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling (Consultative Selling).
The protocol developed and in use in Needs Satisfaction Selling (which by now had become the standard for selling on a global scale), was no longer adequate. Something more was needed. In his classic work, SPIN Selling (Neil Rackham – 1988) showed how fundamental sales skills and techniques (as proposed by PSS) could be used to ask the right kind of questions and actually reduce the need to sell, stimulating the opportunity for professional salespeople to consult.

One of the most common strategies in almost all of the post PSS sales methods (and most particularly in Rackham’s SPIN) is best described as the “hurt and rescue” approach to selling. The salesperson finds out the problem the customer has and identifies what “hurts” the customer and then “rescues” the customer by introducing the features and benefits of the products being sold.

SPIN took the concept of “hurt and rescue” to a new level. Gone was the concept of identifying and handling customer objections. Although SPIN still relied on an introduction and pre-call research, the entire focus of this Consultative Selling method was based on using questioning techniques to help customers become self-aware. SPIN relied on four different questions to help customers “rescue” themselves:

Situational Questions in which the salesperson made an attempt to find out some background that could be used to gauge the buyer’s business situation and understand the context of the issues that would be used in the sales process.

Problem Questions were asked to uncover what “hurt” the prospect. The trap here, created by asking these types of questions so early in the sales cycle, was that salespeople would ask questions related to the problems the customer had, that could be rescued by the salesperson’s
products. So, although SPIN positioned itself as a consultative, solutions oriented sales method, very much like PSS, it was another way to sell the company’s products rather than to really solve the buyer’s problems by providing a solution. Perhaps the only real difference was the depth to which SPIN took the questioning techniques in its more consultative approach.

Implication Questions were asked to bridge the gap between what the salesperson’s products or services could do, and the “hurt” uncovered by the salesperson. So instead of telling the customer what the features and benefits were, the salesperson would ask the customer to visualise the implications of the problem without having the product / solution.

Needs Payoff Questions represented the final phrase of SPIN. Having identified what hurt the prospect it was now up to the salesperson to rescue them by giving them something to identify how a solution would resolve the pain that was being felt.

Overall, SPIN was, together with PSS, a combination of the most revolutionary approaches to selling. Whilst PSS introduced features and benefits with a focus on understanding the customer, SPIN took that process further and involved the customer in a consultative approach to selling. The key issue is why these two programmes – Need Satisfaction Selling and the Consultative Selling approach – were so successful? The reality is quite simple – they were both developed in response to the increased sophistication and demands of customers.

As far back as 1968 Xerox recognised that customers want choice. They don’t want salespeople to come in and tell them what to do, they want salespeople to consult with them, to be advisers and to help them make the right decision from a plethora of choices. They want salespeople to be sufficiently well trained to understand business and brave enough to propose new and sometimes revolutionary concepts as solutions. They expect professional salespeople to challenge their thinking and in that way, introduce new ideas.

Certainly in the case of SPIN, with its highly consultative approach to selling, the sales method is about the salesperson gaining an understanding of the customer. That foundation, laid by people such as Hammalian and Rackham is as relevant today, as it was then. Most of the sales methods offered today are based on PSS and/or SPIN, with added input from psychology and new research. In doing so, the new methodologies have clarified some elements of the former methods and given us a more refined evolution of what PSS and SPIN were.

Since the 1980s a range of other organisations also started developing sales methods, usually designed to support and promote their sales training programmes rather than to introduce improvements in sales methodology.

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 1 (1900 -1950s)

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 3 (1990s – 2010’s)

The post The History of Sales Methodology – Part 2 (late 1950s – 1980s) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Methodology and Philosophy (1900 -1950s)

• Trust Based Selling – Improve professional image by building trust (1916 – DM Barrett / Patterson)
• Scientific Selling – Use phrenology to identify prime prospects (1916 – Phrenologists)
• Mood Selling – Use emotion to persuade customers to buy (1920’s – American Bible Society & American Bible Tract)
• Fuller Brush Men – Focused on people. Strong management helping sales teams (1920’s – Fuller Brush Co. / Alfred C. Fuller / Albert E. Teetsel)
• Psychological Selling – Learn to understand what makes buyers tick (1930’s – Dale Carnegie / Ford Motor Company)
• Barrier Selling – Get prospects to say ‘yes’ often enough to be trapped (1930’s – Insurance companies and Britannica Encyclopaedia)
• SELL – Tell-Sell process leading customer to a commitment (1940-50’s)
• ADAPT – Develop some pseudo technical jargon to keep buyers intrigued (1940-50’s)
• ARC – Cross selling and up selling in retail (1940-50’s)

1916

A major milestone in sales methodology development took place in 1916 when the first World Salesmanship Congress took place in Detroit (USA). Its constitution vowed the event was to “promote the dignity of salesmanship by the elevation of the rank of the salesman to a higher
plane” and to “encourage contributions to the science of salesmanship in the form of books, lectures, courses and publications.” The idea for the event came from D.M. Barrett, who was the editor of Salesmanship magazine and who had already organised a sales club in Detroit whose slogan was “Business betterment through betterment in salesmanship”. The keynote speaker at the congress was Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA at that time. Here we can see how individuals and organisations made the first attempts at making sales a more prestigious career and also at giving sales a rightful place within businesses.

Patterson (NCR) was one of the major sponsors of the World Salesmanship Congress. The sales methodology being promoted then, as the most effective of the day, and the message given to the more than three thousand salespeople who attended the congress, was that to be effective salespeople needed to build trust with customers. Earning and keeping the customer’s trust, attendees heard, “was the only way to promote the dignity of salesmanship, elevating the salesman to a higher plane…”

Even at this early stage in the evolution of sales methodologies, new sales techniques were being promoted as the answer to the challenges salespeople faced.

Amongst the more dubious people that introduced alternative sales methods at the World Salesmanship Congress was one Grant Nablo, a phrenologist (someone who is supposed to be able to read a person’s character by the shape of their skull). His proposed sales methodology
hinged on salesmen learning to read the character of their prospects by observing the shape of their skull. The basis of this sales method, proposed as the “introduction of Science in Selling”, was that if salespeople identified prospects with high foreheads they could improve sales for new products because these people (with high foreheads) were more imaginative than others and were likely to be early adopters, making selling new ideas, products and services easier and quicker.

So popular was the Science in Selling (phrenology) method that the Ford Motor Company produced a primer for its sales force – “Ford Products and Their” Sale (1923) that contained the following instruction: “Sell the vehicle according to the shape of the prospect’s head. High foreheads leave room for larger development and indicate people who are less likely to resist new ideas…”

1920’s

The great depression in the US, caused by the stock market crash of 1929, gave impetus to a range of sales methodologies as more and more people – struggling to earn a living – turned to selling simply because of the low barriers to entry into the craft. Although efforts to organise and standardise sales systems had started already, they were the realm of big corporations and mostly those operating in the B2B arena. This left the majority of people coming into the sales profession with little or no training at all from the companies they joined –organisations such as the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society– so they developed their own methodologies. The more successful of these enjoyed a period in the sunshine as the techniques spread and appeared to have some success. Amongst the more familiar – vestiges of which still continue in selling today – are the sales methods of:

Mood Selling which was introduced at the time of the depression. It was developed by bible salesmen who called door-to-door and, without any sales training, attempted to appeal to the emotions of buyers by claiming that the purchase of a bible would not only be good for the customer’s soul, but would help the salesperson stave off the starvation of his children.

This method of selling relied on an emotional pull to the people being sold to. Popular appeals were the saving of a soul (bible) and helping the salesperson feed their children (who these salespeople often took with them on their sales calls).

For a time, Mood Selling was a successful, though less than ethical, sales methodology. But customers and prospects started to see through the techniques being used and began to resist the appeals made by these “salespeople”. The change in buyer attitude forced salespeople to take stock of what they were doing and how they were selling.

Amongst the myriad of methodologies that came to play during this time, was that of the Fuller Brush Company. The company had been founded in 1906 by Alfred C. Fuller, who would both manufacture the brushes by night and sell them by day. In 1908, his wife joined him in his selling efforts and had better results than he did on her first day, and almost every day for a couple of years. By the 1920s The Fuller Brush Company had people all over the country going door-to-door selling brushes. But there was something different about these salespeople. Fuller provided them with training on a system that gained them entry to the houses they called on almost every time. The sales method had been developed by Alfred C. Fuller and refined with the collaboration of his sales managers. Every call started with presenting a gift to the housewife, followed by a demonstration of their products – Fuller had worked out early on that the key was to sell what the brushes could do for his clients, not the brushes themselves. In 1922, these men started to be known as the “The Fuller Brush Men”. They were not employed by the company, they were distributors. They each had a territory and the tools and processes they needed to be successful. One of the most talented managers was Albert E. Teetsel who brought to the company the concept of positive thought. He encouraged every salesperson to always reply to “How are you?” with “Fine and dandy”, underscoring the company’s most distinctive feature – its emphasis on people. Each distributor had to sign a pledge which said, amongst other things, that the salesperson’s “obligation is one of
service to the customer, to the company I represent and to the community in which I live and work.”, and, “I will be courteous; I will be kind; I will be sincere; I will be helpful.” The commercial and popular success of the company was built on the focus on its people, in particular, the sales team.

1936

In 1936 the iconic book ”How to Win Friends and Influence People” was published, catapulting Dale Carnegie to the head of the line of sales gurus. The huge success of his book is still being felt today and many of the modern sales techniques (including the concept of Customer Centric and Relationship Selling) have Carnegie to thank because they haven’t ventured too far from what he propagated as the way to effective relationship building and successful selling.

With everyone in sales trying to win friends and influence people, the advent of commission and sales incentives changed the paradigm once again and launched what was a successful, but massively flawed, sales methodology – Barrier Selling. This powerful technique evolved at the same time as salespeople were making the adjustment from earning a base salary to commission as an incentive for sales performance. The technique pushed salespeople to manipulate their customers.

Barrier Selling was (is) the sales method of asking customers leading questions to which the most logical answer would be “Yes.” Salespeople would ask several questions getting a string of affirmative (yes) responses before throwing in the key question “And of course, you want us to deliver this widget early next week?”

In using this method, two factors worked against the customer. One was the fact that salespeople seldom applied it without a spouse or child being present. So, for example, insurance salespeople – who were (and still are) notorious for using this technique – would never sell life insurance to a partner without the spouse being present. The kind of questions asked would be something like: “Obviously if something happened to you, you would want your partner to be looked after. Wouldn’t you?” It is unlikely that the person would say no in any circumstances, but even less so, with the partner present. Britannica Encyclopaedia salespeople were no different. They wouldn’t attempt to sell a set of Britannica without the
children being present. And the questions used to “trap” the buyer would be something like: “Obviously you want your child to have the very best education possible, don’t you?”

At the time that this technique was popular, salespeople still had a large role to play in providing information. Customers had little choice, limited access to information and relied heavily on what salespeople said and did, in order to learn about new products and services. In addition, there weren’t laws and controls to prohibit salespeople or protect consumers from this type of behaviour. Caveat Emptor – “let the buyer beware…” was the consumer mantra of the day. Salespeople made claims and promises, used techniques and methods simply to get a deal. And they did so with impunity and little fear of consequence. Because a large portion of a
salesperson’s income at the time (very often as much as 90%) was based on their ability to close the deal, salespeople were willing to risk everything with little thought to how customers felt or suffered as a result of their activities.

So destructive was this method of selling that governments introduced the cooling off period, allowing people to cancel agreements entered into under these circumstances.

1930s to early 1950s

In the period from around mid 1930s to early 1950s, just after the decline in the popularity of Barrier Selling, a range of alternative selling methods of little effectiveness, appeared on the scene. Each of these represented a different approach to selling that claimed, at the time, to revolutionise the way salespeople performed. Some of the more popular of these included:

SELL – Show, Explain advantage, Lead to benefit, Let them talk
This method encouraged salespeople to the Tell-Sell approach. Salespeople told their prospects success stories, in the process showing features of their products, explaining the product’s advantages and how other customers became successful or achieved staggering results (benefits) as a result of using this products.

ADAPT – Assessment, Discovery, Activation, Projection, Transition
Adapt was an acronym that became popular around the 1950s in Britain as a means of interacting with customers and prospects. The focus of this (at the time) popular method was to undertake some form of pseudotechnical assessment. The salesperson gave the appearance of using some methodology to assess the prospect’s business issues, though none of the records actually illustrate how this assessment was actually conducted. Once the assessment had been conducted, salespeople then directed the sales call, hoping that the prospect would discover how a product would benefit them. Once this discovery was made the salesperson would request a commitment which would transition the buyer from prospect to customer.

ARC – Ask, Recommend, Cross-sell and Close
In the early 1950s a sales method, uniquely designed to improve retail sales situations, evolved. ARC encouraged salespeople to ask customers what they wanted and then to introduce additional items to complement the initial interest. This method of cross-selling improved sales performance and enabled salespeople to increase the size of the original order. It wasn’t long before ARC spread to other areas of selling. Even in business-to-business selling the idea of cross-selling found traction and enabled salespeople to expand share of wallet. This technique was later used as part of Strategic Selling (Miller Heiman, 1975) to help salespeople cross and up-sell, and in the process increase share of wallet.

Coming up soon:

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 2 (late 1950s – 1980s)

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 3 (1990s – 2010’s)

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