Ode To Our Brave Salesmen & Saleswomen!

photo: Forrester Research executive partners further discussing Gen One Ventures opening keynote presentation regarding sales and marketing leadership.

My name is Peter Weedfald and I am a salesman. I am proud and honored to declare it, to live it, to teach it, to appreciate it, to be personally energized and blessed by it. It feels good to say "I am a salesman!"

I sometimes believe, like many sales people, that I have been rejected, deflected and office ejected more times over three decades than any other sales person in our business. Yet, like so many sales peers, I forge ahead hunting for the next potential sale, the next team victory. I know our brand of products is a promise to merchants, to consumers, to our own employees, to so many more. I also know I personally represent our brand promise and I am assigned to ensure competitive advantage, to ensure it mirrors our corporate creed, and helps achieve our company dreams.

How about you? Are you a professional salesman or saleswoman? Does your company leadership respect, honor and appreciate your rough and tumble efforts each and every day? If yes, be proud and realize you are very special. You are weathered and schooled across the fields of manufacturing, merchandising, retail and publishing. You are a highly disciplined business leader living in a world of rejection, anticipation and many times lonely victories. You dare to lead yourself and your team. You dare to dominate mighty old and new competitors. You show determination as you are simultaneously slammed with revised forecasts and budgets, "up yet another 20% for next year." You are built to win, built to be responsible, built to be a market maker.

For those of you not in sales, who have not held the full territory responsibility to pour liquid revenues and profits into the cold steel of a company's profit and loss (P&L) statement you are missing the anguish of defeat, and the passionate elation of victory.

So you know, salesman and saleswoman have beautiful and inspiring dreams every day. They dream of success by earning the right to ask for the business, garnering the sale. They dream of making a customer happy, working to overachieve again and again. They dream of winning, avoiding rejection, never losing to a formidable competitor. They call objections nothing more than "a request for more information." They dream of coming home to family to park and rest their exhausted feet, and escape for the weekend from flying silver bullets at 30,000 feet, bouncing through cloudy and sunny skies to visit, to command opportunity. All to garner the mighty sale one more time. All to achieve their dream: to announce the joy of a new sale to their boss, to their spouse, to their children... to themselves through their own aspiring yet sometimes foggy mirror of sales success.

Best-of-breed sales people know only too well that sales and marketing has changed forever based upon a killer app known as the Internet. The Internet has changed our traditional selling, advertising and marketing push model into a new consumer-empowered, consumer-published pull model: "when and if consumers have interest in your brand, products or services they will let you, their friends and their colleagues know."

The old saying "speed kills" either works for you or against you based upon your company's speed of adoption to the Internet. These infrastructure changes are causing both hyper-disruption and hyper-opportunity for our sales organizations on the front lines. For those of you not on the front lines of sales, but rather reside in marketing, administration, accounting or corporate leadership, let me please share with you the voice of your sales organization working so hard to fulfill your company dreams. I have learned through my own positive and negative selling years that when you listen to your sales organization rolling hard throughout the channel you gain immediate competitive advantage. Of course, if and only if you treat them as ambassadors at the last three feet of the sale and take action on their observations, their council and guidance.

As you read these words know your sales team is here within to solicit your smart support for additional resources, to offer those who stay in the office the opportunity to see and hear what we in sales experience on the front lines. Change and opportunity are both vast and hard fought these days. Here are just seven change requests and learned pleas from your savvy sales organization hunting and fishing on the front lines of opportunity:

1. Please core down heavy up and collaborate aggressively with our business partners and consumer publishing infrastructures to attract, convert and retain our very best consumers. In essence, don't be a mile wide across advertising mediums fishing for potential consumers with our scarce and precious below-the-line advertising budgets. Rather let's be a smart inch deep by uniting our afforded product budgets directly with our consumer advertising budgets to ensure competitive brand and product pull impact. Search and search hard through savvy SEM and SEO advantage, not independently but rather alongside and in congress with our best customers, retailers and partners.

2. Please power up our CRM data mining infrastructure in concert with our social engineering and email foundations to smartly run, perform and partner with our retail and manufacturing partners' engagement platforms. Choir together rather than solo alone.

3. Please focus and position our products as our brave brand hero. Focus on our brand as our product's emotional selling capital. Please sell consumers through advertising why we are better, stronger, perhaps better featured. Please stop selling our brand and products metaphorically. There is no time in the Internet Economy to offer distracting metaphors and sideshows of dancing bears. Please sell the sizzle of our products, of our brand hero's competitive advantage.

4. Clarity is sometimes a casualty. Please define with great clarity who we are, where and how we are focused competitively advantaged revealing our core, united mission at hand. Then we can congener together to sell our position and company dream to our best targets: to our own internal team, manufacturing partners, editors, analysts, consumers, social networks and even to our stock holders.

5. Please be more media and editorial driven. Take advantage of all free digital, social, editorial and relevant resources to express and fuel our product's well earned competitive value. Let's hyper-accelerate the social-enabling good word of our product offerings.

6. Please, please, please deliver more data, more relevant knowledge, more competitive insights to your field sales people. With smart, fast clips of relevant market and competitive knowledge we can pursue, navigate, invest, align and sell our best, most profitable opportunities. He or she who owns the data can sell and win through the smart dignity of relevant knowledge.

7. Please stop trying to compete with our profitable business partners. Having our own website designed to sell and take orders puts us at a competitive channel disadvantage. We have viewed our website sales numbers and they are dismal versus even our most important smallest retail partner. Let's stop spending dollars and assets on our e-commerce efforts and re-deploy them into a stronger and smarter unification and partner advertising/selling program to drive our retail and Internet channel success.

Selling is not for the faint of heart. Selling is not easy. The sagacity and professional leadership of a world class salesman is any company's most valuable asset as are their thoughts, observations and advice from the front lines of our customers' offices. Our sales people are asking for our help, so they can in turn help our channel partners, our potential consumers and our P&L's to make the right choice based upon enlisting stronger competitive demand.

So now that you know your salesman's secret we wish you great selling roads of prosperity ahead. Our ode to every consumer electronics salesman and saleswoman lives and breathes through our respect for their long days and nights away from home, for their painful rejections, for their glorious Spartan victories. All accredited and only made possible through the caring and sharing hard work of their important team members back at the home office, thousands of miles away and within our incredible manufacturing hubs ready and willing to unleash more capacity, more team support.

Finally, our ode for our hard working sales people: "It all comes down to the point of sale where will it take you, what will it say about you, will you last or will you fail."

Peter Weedfald is president of Gen One Ventures and author of Green Reign Leadership