The Best Salesperson in Your Business

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

A common myth in which many small business owners believe is that all they need to do is find a great salesperson to be successful. They already know how to make great widgets, and they are really good at providing their service to their clients, but if they just had someone who is good at door-to-door to bring in new customers, their business would be brilliant!

The problem is to find great salespeople. On average, most sales people are average. By definition, half are below average! You can, of course train a new sales person, but if you are not great at sales, it will be the blind leading the blind.

You may find a great salesperson – they certainly exist. A great salesperson may be good at selling lots of things, but the thing they are best at selling is themselves. They know their value. They know the value of the business they generate.

Unfortunately, many business owners truly don’t understand the value of great salespeople and will not pay for the best. They are expensive. They like to have uncapped commissions. They will probably be the most expensive people in the business. They will also most likely leave you when they realise you need them more than they need you. The really great salespeople work for themselves. The ones that stay are the average ones.

Large businesses with many sales staff know that they must continually invest in sales training and have sales managers to drive performance in an effort to keep them above average. In contrast, small businesses try to hire salespeople with these skills already in place. They try to get them on the cheap. Only the average ones are cheap.

For any business that has been around a number of years, the owner will have developed some sales skills. They are also likely to be the best salesperson in their business. This is as you would expect, as they have the greatest incentive. The profit goes to them. They are also responsible for the training and support of any sales staff, whose skills and motivation will almost certainly be less.

However, some business owners truly dislike the sales process. They would like to be left alone to build their widgets with someone else providing the customers. The only way that they can do this is if they get a job working for another widget maker.

Business owners need to make the choice on whether they want to stay in love with widget making, or fall in love with owning a widget business.

Marketing and sales is part of every business and the owner must take a lead in these areas. This is what differentiates the owner from the employee that just makes widgets.The owner must be prepared to be the best in marketing and sales so they can lead their sales team. This means investing in education and training for themselves if they are unsatisfied with their existing sales results.

In small business, the best salesperson must be the owner. It’s their business. If they can’t sell it to others, who else can?

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Sales for People who hate Selling

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Are you someone who could sell ice to Eskimos? Not everyone is a natural salesperson, but in business, nothing happens until a sale is made. So what do you do if you hate selling, or you can’t find staff to sell for you?

You can create a marketing strategy that does not rely on strong sales skills. Imagine someone just comes into your business and when you ask: “How can I help you?”, they say: “I want to buy that and here is my money.”Does that sound too good to be true? Well it happens all the time. Look what happens when you go into McDonalds. The person just says: “May I take your order please?” They don’t spend time explaining why their burgers are superior to everyone else’s or that their prices are the best. They don’t have to, because this is all done by the marketing that the buyer is exposed to prior to entering the store- and when they enter, they will buy.

McDonald’s has chosen this approach because they are using low skill labour and they don’t want to go to the expense of teaching their low wage, part-time and casual staff how to sell.

If you create a marketing strategy that sells your buyers before they contact you, you don’t have to be a super-salesperson to make a sale from an enquiry. The marketing does all the hard work for you and all you have to do is to take the order.

To do this, however, you must have a marketing system. A good marketing system will attract enquiries so you don’t have to cold call, and pre-qualifies buyers so that the tyre-kickers and time wasters are filtered out.

Then a sales pipeline is used through which you move your buyer, step-by-step. Each step is a test where the buyer must make a new commitment to you before they move to the next. At the penultimate step they have decided that they want your product and it is value for money. Then all you have to do is ask them: “May I take your order please.”

This requires a lot more planning than you will see from salespeople in a used car lot, where arm wrestling seems to be the most important skill. We are no longer talking about hunting the buyer – instead we nurture them.

There are few really natural sales people that you can hire. (The very best start their own business.) Yes, your employees should have sales training, but boost it with a well defined sales pipeline so even people who hate selling can sell for you. This also removes the dependence on a star salesperson who could leave your business at any time (and probably will).

So even if you have staff that could sell ice to Eskimos, don’t you think their skills would produce more sales if you also used a sales pipeline, and sold Eskimos something they really want, like central heating, and then you can sell them an icemaker for their drinks so they don’t have to go outside.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Sales Intelligence: The Forgotten Intelligence

by Jim Prigg

Charles Handy in his tremendous book on change in the work place “The Hungry Spirit” (Hutchison Random House ISBN 0 09 180 1680) talks about the various types of intelligence we as humans have developed.

In fact as we have become more educated and sophisticated the specific number of these intelligences has increased. Handy suggests there will be other intelligences identified.

Handy states we are all born with basic intelligences such as:-

Factual Intelligence.............The facility of knowledge remembrance and recall we are traditionally schooled in

Analytic Intelligence............The ability to be able to reason & conceptualise

Numeric Intelligence............Being at ease with numbers of all sorts

A combination of these three will get us through most tests. But there are other intelligences we have developed that can help us in specialist ways. Handy identified the following intelligences:

Linguistic...............The facility to make our self understood
Spatial....................The capacity to see patterns and trends
Athletic...................The capacity to be physically superior
Intuitive..................An aptitude to sense & see what is not obvious
Emotional...............The capacity to be persistent, zealous, self aware, in control and self motivated
Technical................The ability to understand physical data
Practical..................The capacity to operate with common sense
Interpersonal..........The ability to get things done with and through others
Musical....................A skill that involves rhythm, sound and form

But is there another skill that the world has forgotten, taken for granted or just chosen to ignore?

All these skills mentioned above alone will not make much commercial impact unless we add the value of the neglected intelligence.


What of the binding glue of Sales Intelligence in the world? This is indeed a rare ability to bring buyer and seller, protagonist and antagonist and negotiator and purchaser together?

This unique skill is most evident in the sale of intangibles (insurance), concepts (wealth creation), ideas (aged care) and ideologies

So often in our society academics, bureaucrats, legislators and consumerists fail to understand that there is a real demand for Sales Intelligence.


So often people don’t want to face reality and purchase the product that solves their problem. Case in point: Insurance. Yet our capitalist economy depends on it to keep the wheels of industry, commerce and society rolling.

Sales Intelligence is absolutely essential to the success of our corporate, business and personal life. Yet, scant regard is given to this skill by those who wish to frame our consumerist laws and social mores today.

Sales Intelligence draws it strength and resilience from across all the intelligences. Yet people who are illiterate, blindly ignorant, stubborn, deaf and dumb, devoid of analytically skills and numerically challenged can be make tremendous sales people. Perhaps that irks the intellectuals?

So what are some of the components of this Sales Intelligence?

Compassion.....................Solving problems
A competitive spirit........Enthusiastically wanting to achieve
Empathy..........................Single minded focus to see as others do
Goals definition..............Rewards for effort
Emotional strength.........Record keeping
Self analysis.....................Skills practice
Call persistence...............Profitable productivity
Self belief.........................A sense of humour
Resilience........................Persistence
Diagnostic analysis.........Sharing

One of the remarkable things about Sales Intelligence is that you never stop learning. There are always new challenges and there is always a constant and universal demand for the skill.

Yet many of our educationalists retire to the hallowed halls of academia and never create anything new. Do they practise any of the above skills?

Yet sales people must respond to the market and succeed no matter what the state of the economy, the budgetary condition of their prospects or the expectations of their principals.

Academics and management are aware of the explicit need for sales intelligence. But why do they allot so little of their budget for real sales training?

There have been those who have been uprooted from their normal life, moved to foreign countries, been displaced, retrenched, made redundant or generally been spurned by the nice side of life who, as a last resort have turned to their native Sales Intelligence to finally succeed above all the odds. Why is this so?

This attribute not only serves those who are successful, but it is a final last resort for many of those with nowhere else to go. They are able to achieve phenomenal results, simply because they must!

So if you live by your wits, intuition and native cunning through sales be very, very proud of it. Sadly in our well-ordered society today many commentators get fed, not for supporting those that create the wealth and opportunities that Sales Intelligence delivers but for putting obstacles and negative attitudes in their way.

Sales Intelligence allows the persistent, the perseverant and the economically desperate to succeed against all sorts of odds.

So next time you read about or hear some commentator sermonize about the way you are remunerated, the size of your pay check or how you are rewarded, remember this.

You are rewarded for the courage to ask people for the order every day, despite the negatives, the procrastination, the armchair critics and the sidelines experts.

You have the belief to continue on. Your reward is convincing and helping people do for themselves that which they know is morally, socially and economically correct, even when they are reluctant to act.

I wonder if your critics would have the intestinal fortitude to do what you every day to not just survive, but thrive!


Jim Prigg. ADVICE: Publications and Training at www.financialservicessalesacademy.com.au


The Australian Small Business Blog