DEATH OF A SALESMAN?

How many salespeople are there in your organisation?

I was having a LinkedIn cull the other day and it struck me how my personal axe was mainly falling on those that had made contact with an intelligently put-together but ultimately “salesy” message. Why was such a large proportion of the cull sales-based?

I’ve worked with some brilliant colleagues at various businesses who would unashamedly class themselves as salespeople. I’m also sure that some colleagues and clients if asked to pigeonhole me would call me a salesperson too. But that’s not how I see myself…but why not? And why would I not want to?

SPARK have been lucky enough to have been growing over the past few years and so have recruited new team members in marketing, operations and client services. We’ve also been looking for talent to fill sales roles but have found it hard to find the right people and so roles lie unfilled. And yet we’re still growing the customer base and meeting some great new clients.

One of the services SPARK offer is B2B representation for brands such as Cineworld, Showcase, Panorama, Picturehouse, Reel and many more for whom our ability to “sell” was key to our appointment…so would they be horrified to hear me admit that I don’t think there’s a salesperson within our business?

I’d love to say that we’d implemented a hugely successful automated lead-generation platform, but we haven’t. We’ve got a talented marketing team who are wrestling with a heavy workload but we haven’t yet developed the magic process that sees an endless supply of new opportunities.

So what are we doing right and what does it mean for sales roles in our business?
We’ve got great products which help and a group of clients who believe in us and the work we do, and we in turn bend over backwards to make them happy with the work we do for them. So much of our new business pipeline is from people that find us through recommendations from others.

To answer the opening question for the SPARK organisation…how many salespeople do we have? The answer is none, and also all of us. Growth comes from great relationships, talented people and hard-work with a focus on what our client’s need. We still have sales roles open by the way…but it might be time for a rethink on who we’re looking for…