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3: The Science of Sales Skills Assessment

Behavioral assessment measures the characteristics that are part of a person's basic personality. It is difficult to detect, people find it intrusive, and the results are a profile of a person that includes qualities that an employer may find it very difficult to change.

By contrast, skills assessment measures an individual's knowledge, judgment, and intentional behaviors that are applied to a specific purpose. These traits are more evident, less intrusive (it is clearly work-related), and the methods for changing or teaching skills are more effective and more directly applicable to job performance.

For example, skills measurement can assess the depth of knowledge about the selling process and consider activities that are observable in practice. What results is a clear indication of things that a person can learn and do in order to be more effective.

Another sharp contrast is that behavioral assessment is highly scientific and is based on a body of theory and principles that have stood over a long period of time, whereas skills assessment begins with a highly subjective and speculative set of assumptions (what is "the right thing to do" can be highly subjective and dependent on a specific situation). It is becoming less so, but has only begun to take a truly scientific approach in recent decades.

The (Embarrassing) History of Sales Skill Assessment

At the World Salesmanship Conference in 1916, a phrenologist, suggested that the most effective salesman would be a person with a high forehead and a pronounced bulge on the back of their skull. As bizarre as it may sound today, given that phrenology has been dismissed as unscientific and quite silly, it was "taken quite seriously" at the time.

But it calls to mind the considerable amount of literature that exists in the present day that propones to apply "science" to selling. How much of it is based on real science? How much of it will seem bizarre and foolish a hundred years from now? And yet, much of it is taken quite seriously, by those who are gullible enough to grant credibility to anything that appears to be scientific.

The author's own literary search has led him to the conclusion that most books that claim to be scientific are not even up to the level of phrenology. They claim to be scientific, but there is no science at all to be found in their content: it's pontification, anecdotes, and storytelling of the most general kind.

Considering the research being done in academia, very few valid scientists (behavioral psychologists) have shown much interest in the topic of sales - and those who are interested in sales have little interest in using valid science to prove their points.

The author suggests a few reasons. The profession is considered too pedestrian for academic study (sales is the avocation of drop-outs); it is so clouded by nonsense that it would harm their reputation to be involved; sales is a petty and pedestrian practice done to make money; what is learned about sales has no broader application to the discipline.

Colleges do not offer degrees in salesmanship, and the nearest discipline to sales is marketing, which takes a disdainful look at salesmanship. Specifically, one of the most influential academics in the field of business, Peter Drucker, has declared the aim of marketing is to make salesmanship unnecessary.

In the 1930s and 1940s, sales trainers began to look at behavior in a way that approached scientific inquiry, but focused on ritual behaviors that could be statistically correlated to sales, but had no direct causal connection. For example, one such course focused of exactly how a salesman should hand a pen to the customer when asking them to sign a contract. Such minutia is clearly unworthy of scientific inquiry.

The Advent of Sales Process

Historically, the sales process has been based on business operations: putting a prospective customer through a specific set of steps to gather the information necessary for the supplier to fill his order, largely with an eye toward making the customer behave in a way that enabled the business to be more efficient.

In this process, the salesman's role was to communicate information between parties. As computer technology began to be adopted by business in the 1970s, it changed operations: the information and the processes were influenced by the information systems itself, and the process for salesmen and customers became much more formalized and rigid - forced to comply with a specific process in minute detail.

The notion of "solution selling" seemed to emerge simultaneously among IBM, Xeros, Wang, and the other technology companies of the period. Because these suppliers offered the same systems and software to many clients, a large number of businesses were compelled to adopt the same business practices for selling.

Specifically, the process for selling was schematized to the following steps:

1. Prospect for new customers
2. Assess customers needs
3. Develop a standard solution
4. Identify value of the system
5. Seek access to decision-makers
6. Present the solution to the decision makers
7. Negotiate a contract
8. Deliver the goods

This was widely adopted by firms that were eager to take advantages of computer technology, and many firms changed their own operations to accommodate this process, without much consideration of whether it was better than their present one.

It was merely assumed that this process was effective, even without a statistical method of considering its impact, and even though it has in many instances failed to produce results. Rather than considering that the system itself might be flawed, "failure was always attributed to the unwillingness or inability of the individual sales rep to execute the techniques."

The Limitations of Sales Process

The sales process did have one arguable benefit: it provided the ability to do a closer examination of the activities related to sales. Previously, firms were aware only of the amount of orders that were coming in, and had no insight into the orders they didn't get - where the process might be breaking down, and where improvement in activities had the potential to produce real results.

Unfortunately, there were more missteps to come: Sales Force Automation (which immediately connotes the bias toward considering sales as a ritualized set of procedures comparable to working on an assembly line) and its later successor, Computer Relationship Management, sought to make the process of selling more standardized and repeatable - but both relegated salesmen to following a standardized set of behaviors without much consideration of whether the behaviors, themselves, were effective.

The salesmen themselves found the process to be immediately objectionable. Not only did it constrain them to behaviors they knew to be ineffective in making sales, it also required them to do a great deal of data entry about activities that did not result in a sale. When salesmen worked around the system to be more effective, or refused to waste their time with busywork, it was treated as a disciplinary problem.

The prospective customer also had a negative reaction to being subjected to a rigid system in order to make a simple purchase. Simply stated, it made buying difficult and unpleasant. Before globalization and competition, they suffered through it to obtain goods from suppliers - but when competition increased, customers opted to do business with firms that made the buying process easier and more efficient for them.

In spite of the flaws, a systemized selling process provided a basis for analysis, providing sales managers with the ability to consider more than just the outcome, but to identify the process in ways that were not previously measurable - and the data enabled them to identify and encourage behaviors that led to success as well as diagnose the problem with those that had failed. In the rare instances this was done well, it had significant positive results.

Even so, analysis of the sales process was limited to measuring the superficial data - what happened, without a clear indication of why it happened. The reason that something worked or did not worked was entirely invisible, which leaves sales managers with the ability to know that a problem exists, but they must speculate on what might be done to address it.

Evolution of Sales Skills

The sales process is largely geared toward measuring performance after the fact, and those individuals who wish to improve performance by providing guidance beforehand (sales managers and trainers) recognize the problems in the sales process. The author suggests that this has been a gradual shift in thinking.

In general, the "shift" is a movement away from after-the fact measurements and the emphasis on the benefits to the efficiency of the organization to an approach that (rightly) recognizes the customer demands to be served by his vendors rather than manipulated by them. Concepts such as Customer-Centric Selling (Bosworth) and New Solution Selling (Eades) reflect this change in attitude.

The authors' own brand for this methodology is Customer-Focused Selling (CFS), which is similar to some of the other models, but they feel theirs to be superior because of the scientific information on which it has been based. There are two key characteristics that depart from some of the errors made in the older models of selling:

1. It is focused on the customer rather than the seller. Ultimately, success is not achieved because a company wishes to sell a product, but because it provides a product the customer wishes to buy, for reasons external to the seller.
2. It is focused on empowering salesmen rather than controlling them. Given that there is a great deal of variability in the needs and interests of customers, giving salesmen ritualized behaviors and memorized scripts to use in any situation is clearly the wrong approach.

The basic premise is that, which process drives sales, skills drive process - or to use an analogy, a skilled navigator with a rough map is more likely to reach a desired destination than an incompetent navigator with a highly detailed map.

Limitations of Solution Selling

One of the limitations of the solution selling methodology is that it is based on a rigid set of question-response interactions: when the client says this, you say that. These were generally presented in two classes: diagnostic questions to lead the customer to disclose information about problems or opportunities that are biased to favor the seller's solution, and scenario questions that are designed to get customers to visualize how a solution would provide benefits in a hypothetical situation.

The conversation between salesman and customer was driven entirely by the salesman, who controlled and directed the customer toward the inexorable conclusion that he should buy whatever was being offered. It was assumed that the customer would be a willing and passive party to this process - though as many salesmen can attest, customers have their own ideas about how the conversation should go and are resentful of being ignored and manipulated by a pushy salesman.

The CFS approach dispenses with ritual exchanges, but focuses more on a sales process in which the professional listens to the needs that a customer expresses and asks questions that enable the customer to explore their problems or goals. The skill of the salesman is not in his ability to memorize a script, but to participate in a dynamic and interactive discussion.

The Selling Skills Assessment Tool (SSAT)

(EN: This section reads like a promotional brochure for a quiz that the authors' firm is selling. A 25-question survey instrument designed to objectively assess skills that scientifically proven to be critical to a person's effectiveness as a salesman. The proof behind these claims is left for later chapters - for now, it's just a commercial message.)

Sidebar: History of Skills Assessment

A quick list of key events in skills assessment:

• 1904 - Searles article in System magazine describes the efforts of a few firms to make sales practices more uniform, predictable, and reproducible in order to train new sales representatives
• 1916 - The first conference on sales training is held. It is attended by executives from leading companies, and the nature of the presentations are ludicrous (a phrenologist advised them to hire people with high foreheads, for example)
• 1926 - Snow's book on the Psychology of Personal Selling is an early attempt to draw parallels between the budding field of psychology and the practice of selling, though it focuses on speculation about the behavior of nerve cells in the brain and autonomic responses that take place in a decision-maker.
• 1933 -Bennet's book on Scientific Salesmanship applies economic models of behavior to sales, but still characterizes salesmanship as "applied enthusiasm" and focuses on ritualized behaviors.
• 1950 - Ron Popeil (Ronco) pitches zany products on television, using a highly ritualized sales technique and analyzing responses to refine his infomercials - but also familiarizing the public with the campy and artificial nature of sale pitches.
• 1968 - Mandino's book "The Greatest Salesman in the World" tells a rags-to-riches story of success, but along the way imparts the notion that selling is a matter of mastering specific skills, and provides a program of training for skills improvement.
• 1975 - Watt develops the sales process known as "solution selling" based on ritualized question-answer interaction between salesman and prospect, which catches on with major companies and becomes a standard practice, in spite of its utter lack of a method to measure effectiveness
• 1999 - Martini creates the SSAT to measure selling skills that can be used to assess performance and suggest methods for improvement, ultimately leading to the "Customer-Focused Selling" method that underlies the consulting approach of the authors' company.