BRITISH salesmen and women are not as good at selling as they think they are, researchers have found. A two-year study of 1,000 salesmen has found that although they possess a host of useful qualities, they fall short when it comes to actually selling things.

The findings are based on the latest data (spring 2004-6) from a four-year research programme by Silent Edge, a sales-performance agency.

The study said UK salesmen and women looked good, had great personalities, were capable of establishing a rapport with prospective clients and generally had a sound knowledge of the products and services they offered. The study subjects scored above 80% on all these qualities, but got less than 40% at those skills that contribute to making a sale.

Russell Ward, chief executive of Silent Edge, said: “They’re not as good as they could be at selling. Only one in five deals ever gets closed in the UK today, so vast tracts of the average blue-chip firm’s sales and marketing resources are being wasted. In most of the cases we’ve seen, it’s more a fault of the training process than incompetence.

“We seem to labour under the delusion that great salespeople are born, not made, and as a result most sales training takes the ‘throw mud against the wall and hope it sticks’ format.”

Ward said that often the training was not relevant to the individual, did not take into account people’s competence levels or failed to motivate them to want to change their behaviour.

UK salesmen tended to be strong when singing off their own hymn sheet or when they were required to create off-the-cuff solutions to problems as long as they retained the initiative, he said. But once the client put the salesman or woman on the back foot, performance and results inevitably suffered.

The other major issue in performance was the management of the sales force. Most sales managers were “best sales-person turned manager”, said Ward.

The problem is that the qualities you need to be a good sales manager are often the opposite of those that make a successful salesman or woman. Evaluating the sales-management capability of a team is vital to long-term success.

During Silent Edge’s work on sales training with a number of blue-chip organisations, it concluded there was no effective approach to it.

Companies either used “the sheep-dip approach”, where everyone is treated the same, or they failed to measure the gains from putting more effort into sales.

Ward recalled one instance where a company spent £150,000 on a two-day training course for 150 people. When the sales manager was asked how he measured the beneficial impact of this, the answer was that his people had undergone two days’ training as ordered.

Ward could not fault the course content or the skills of the trainers involved. But neither could he establish just what benefit the course had had.

Silent Edge uses a sales-performance improvement programme that has three main elements: The first step is to produce electronic scorecards of the sales team’s performance. These are intended as a detailed, objective analysis of performance.

Each scorecard records more than 170 objective observations made during the critical minutes of a sales meeting or telesales call. This produces a report on each salesman’s or woman’s abilities that can be used to generate a bespoke development programme.

The next stage is the preparation of a personal development plan that leads to real motivation to improve behaviour because the individual understands the skills that require developing. The final stage is for the performance coach to tailor and design workshops.

Some of Silent Edge’s results have been remarkable. Mike Siddon, regional managing director of Cable & Wireless, said Silent Edge had transformed his sales force, taking them from £750,000 a month to £4m a month in six months, achieving in six weeks what would normally take four months.

Sematron, another communications firm, said turnover had increased by 50% in a year even though the market was growing at less than 5%.

One of Silent Edge’s biggest successes was at 3663, the food-distribution group. Its profits rose 13% from £45m to £51m in a market that was trading backwards.

The company has outlets in Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and New Zealand and covers markets ranging from prisons to five-star hotels.

Andy Kemp, group sales director at 3663, said he had long wanted “to take the sales force to a higher level”, and had now achieved that with Silent Edge.

“They’re down to earth and get right inside your team,” said Kemp. “They’re brutally honest and they’re first class.”

Silent Edge has been working closely with Cranfield School of Management to produce still more accurate analysis of the selling process. Lynette Ryals, professor of strategic sales and accounting management at Cranfield, is particular-ily interested in the way sales techniques are changing.

She said: “We’ve been observing what sales people do when they’re in front of the client and are finding that the relationship element of selling is becoming more important.”

The potential of this approach is considerable. The average success rate of a sales team observed by researchers is only about 50%. That leaves plenty of room for improving efficiency.

roger.eglin@onwight.net

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