Sales “Skill”

The National Sales Center has moved on to Phase 2, aptly named NSC II. The difference between this session and the last, aside from the fact that four trainees have left, is that we do less actual training and more calling. For this entire month, we will be back selling for the Los Angeles Galaxy, last year’s MLS Cup champions. We are already two weeks in, so in another two weeks, some number of people will again graduate from the program.

16 trainees started at Major League Soccer’s National Sales Center on January 2^nd. We are now down to 12. After having been deemed ready for full-time employment by the program’s directors, four initial program members were hired by three different MLS teams last week. The decision to graduate them was based on a few objective criteria, namely how much they sold and how well they scored on the learned techniques, as well as a few smaller factors. This is how we are graded, so this is what we shoot to score high in. Yet I still find myself asking the same question: What is sales skill?

                Everything at the National Sales Center is a contest. Our first item of business when we arrived in Blaine, MN was to pick our cubicles. To determine the pecking order, we played a memory game where any ties were settled via a rock, paper, scissor tournament. Throughout the session, contests have varied from Jeopardy style trivia games to sales revenue challenges, and the prizes have varied from extra cash to MLS gear to pride.  The games incentivize us, keep the job fun and keep us motivated through sales’ low points. The biggest game of all is the big board of stats that the directors keep track of and that we as trainees are always attuned to.  It charts our sales revenue and our “selling technique” grade. These marks form the foundation for choosing who leaves and stays throughout the course of the program, so high scores on the big board are the best indicators of who is next to graduate. In this program, they measure how good of a salesperson you are.

                In sports, it is easy to pick out the best players. They are the ones that run the fastest, jump the highest, throw the hardest, make highlight reel plays, etc. At the National Sales Center, we try to translate these skills into sales, and it sort of works. The idea of comparing people’s stats is nice and tidy, but does it fully indicate sales success? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but we need something to judge us on, and since there are very few concrete numbers in sales, they more or less have to be used. But it does create a few problems. For instance, any salesperson can call a lead that was already set on buying 2 luxury boxes, jot down a credit card number, and have way more revenue than anyone else for the whole program, and that would just be luck. In terms of selling technique grades, we could all be drones with monotone voices and potentially produce a very good score in technique, but would we be experimenting with clients, figuring out on our own what works best and what doesn’t? As much as we try to dissect what makes good and bad salespeople here, it seems like no amount of factors would ever be able to pinpoint very accurately the best from the rest. So we make do with what we can.

                Getting away from the National Sales Center for a second, it’s just a fact of business that certain salespeople are better than others. Over the course of time, statistics generally don’t lie. A salesperson that brings in more revenue over the course of five years is almost certainly better than one who brings in less. So what separates them? Even having been in the sales world for only 6 weeks, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what that is: The winner has a greater passion for sales and competition. Simply put, the most important part of sales is working the most hours in the sales process. You have to love, more than anything else, the brief high you feel after making a sale, have absolute fear of letting someone else beat you, and also have extremely thick skin to ignore those who don’t appreciate your persistence and intrusiveness, and aren’t afraid to say it. If you think this sounds easy, sales is right for you.

                Effort and long hours on the phones aside, I continue to vacillate between believing that sales is a skill-less occupation and believing that some people really know what they’re doing while others really do not. When athletes compete, it is easy to see who was better and why. Maybe the red team had a quarterback who hit every receiver he played with right in the numbers, or maybe the blue team had a pitcher who dominated every hitter he faced. In sales, there is nothing as tangible as that. There isn’t even necessarily a way to tell whether you are doing poorly or doing well because there are times in which nobody is interested in buying, plain and simple. Without being able to measure much of what a salesperson does, we can’t ever be sure of what we are doing “right” and what we are doing “wrong”, leaving a terribly vague notion of what it takes to get better. But like I said before, success seems to be directly linked to high numbers and effort. The salespeople that put the most hours into the sales process and meet the most people have the best chance of meeting someone interested in their product. That’s sales skill.

Sales attracts highly competitive people, which leads me to another topic I hope to tackle next: The Negative Perception of Sales. Before then, I’ll try to fill you in on more details of the sales action in Blaine, MN. 

The MLS season kicks off in 3 weeks...