Visiting Salespeople

Once upon a time, selling was simple – or so we’ve been led to believe. Salespeople prospected, presented, and closed. And that was that. Today, especially in complex, business-to-business markets, selling isn’t enough. Salespeople are being asked to act as diagnosticians, trusted advisors, and value managers. Oh, and let’s not forget the consultative function. They are being taught to sell less in the traditional sense and consult more. But there is a dark side to the new selling. When the balance between selling and consulting tips too far toward consulting, you can find yourself with a sales force full of “professional visitors.”

Richard Langlotz is general manager of 30 business equipment salespeople working from the Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA, Inc., branch in North Richland Hills, TX.
Langlotz is a veteran at defending against professional visitors syndrome. He first battled it when trying to transform technicians, who had the application expertise needed to sell business machines to today’s networked offices, into productive salespeople. “In my industry, a more technical-minded guy is going to turn into a visitor,” says Langlotz. “There are certain techie people who like to share how much knowledge they have.”
Langlotz quickly discovered that whether the technical staff went on a call alone or with a sales professional, they were often unable to close the sale. The answer in this case was technical training for salespeople. It was easier to train good salespeople “who had the core competency to learn the digital environment and the software platforms” than it was to train technical types to sell.

But when salespeople become too focused on the features and capabilities of the solutions they sell, they too can become professional visitors. Langlotz has found that some salespeople “are so proud of all the things that their products will do, they will just not stop talking about it. They think that when their customers know everything they know, they’d have to buy.” Of course, that’s not true. “If there’s not a need for that particular thing in whatever company they are in, salespeople can talk until they are blue in the face,” says Langlotz.

The branch manager has also seen salespeople become professional visitors in order to hide from tasks they dislike, such as cold-calling. “Some salespeople look for every avenue they can not to do that,” Langlotz says. “Reps will become very creative and try to avoid it with an excuse like ‘I had this three-hour appointment today.’”

When managers don’t keep the focus on selling, they can be creating professional visitors themselves. “They won’t like to hear it, but it’s often their fault,” says Langlotz. “It goes back to training and the outlining of expectations. It’s really up to the manager to show the professional visitor that ‘hey, that three-hour conversation was great but it cost you.’”

The good news for managers is that many professional visitors can be reclaimed. “It is totally a fixable thing under most circumstances,” says Langlotz. “If we conduct thorough reviews or debriefings with our reps relative to how they spend their day, how they are working deals, reviewing their prospect lists, and finding out why deals are going out into the ozone, we can save them.”

Managers also have to call salespeople on this sort of behavior. “You can’t avoid feeding the monster,” he says, using a phrase he picked up from former Oklahoma Sooners head coach Barry Switzer. “He was talking about getting winners. Well, when we feed the monster, we are getting our two prospects a day. As long as we all do that, it’s a wonderful job.”

Your sales process could also be producing professional visitors, according to Ira Dym, vice president of brokerage operations for Chicago-headquartered Equis Corporation, a full-service commercial real estate provider with 28 company-owned branches in the U.S. and more than 200 brokers. Dym believes that even the best-intentioned sales managers can inadvertently create professional visitors by forcing salespeople to use a fixed process that does not match their natural style and their customers’ preferences.

“We do stress a consultative approach,” says Dym. “However, we have also come to believe that it’s not the only way to sell.” He has discovered that forcing every sales- person to use this approach alienated some of his salespeople and limited their success. “I have been a huge solution-selling advocate, a consultative selling advocate, for more than a decade,” explains Dym. “But if you are following a program like solution selling, it’s quite complex…it’s almost too complex. That turns some people off.”

A small percentage of Equis’s sales force was unable to comply simply because the process was not a proper match for their personal style and strengths. After training seminars, some of salespeople would thank Dym profusely for the system, he recalls, “but others would say, ‘Please don’t bother me with this again. My way is better.’” Insisting that salespeople stick with the process, whether or not they are comfortable with it, can inadvertently turn those who might otherwise be more successful selling using another process into professional visitors.

Furthermore, explains Dym, clients do not all respond well to the same sales process. For example, Equis has clients who prefer a relationship-style sale. They want to feel as though they are doing business with friends. As Dym says, “There are salespeople who that works for because there are people who like to buy that way.”

One solution for sales managers is to give their employees all the tools and the inspiration to create their own selling systems. Try to avoid mandating a pre-packaged, fixed sales process. Dym suggests, “[Salespeople] don’t want it in its pure form. They’d rather take bits and pieces of it.” These days, he takes a more à la carte approach: “I am not forcing solution selling on them.” He continues to train new hires in solution selling, but he also “layers it” with other techniques so that salespeople can create their own personalized system that works best for them.

And don’t forget the best defense against the professional visitor – the sales compensation plan. “There may be a bigger problem when salespeople are earning a $60,000 salary and $60,000 in commissions,” says Dym. But Equis doesn’t usually have to deal with professional visitors for long. “This is 100 percent commission here,” he explains. “These guys either make it or they don’t.”