Sales Personnel Quotes

The participants were twenty-six men engaged in a variety of professional occupations: sixteen engineers, one engineer-physicist, two mathematicians, two architects, one psychologist, one furniture designer, one commercial artist, one sales manager, and one personnel manager. At the time of the study, there were few women in senior scientific positions, and none was found who wished to participate. Nineteen of the subjects had no previous experience with psychedelics. They were selected on the basis of the following criteria: The participant’s occupation required problemsolving ability. The participant was psychologically stable, as determined by a psychiatric interview examination. The participant was motivated to discover, verify, and apply solutions within his current employment. Six groups of four and one group of three met in the evening several days before the session.a The sequence of events to be followed was explained in detail. In this initial meeting, we sought to allay any apprehension and establish rapport and trust among the participants and the staff.

Take, for instance, the task of training a sales force to sell a new product. The three types of production operations can be easily identified. The conversion of large amounts of raw data about the product into meaningful selling strategies comprehensible to the sales personnel is a process step, which transforms data into strategies. The combination of the various sales strategies into a coherent program can be compared to an assembly step. Here the appropriate product-selling strategies and pertinent market data (such as competitive pricing and availability) are made to flow into one presentation, along with such things as brochures, handouts, and flip charts. The test operation comes in the form of a “dry run” presentation with a selected group of field sales personnel and field sales management. If the dry run fails the test, the material must be “reworked” (another well-established manufacturing concept) to meet the concerns and objections of the test audience.

The highest value provided by sales personnel is to help customers make choices when there is uncertainty and risk. This event is known as the “point of persuasion.” The purpose of sales compensation is to reward seller success at the point of persuasion.

Guideline #12: Hire a professional. Remember the definition of a job seeker I posted at the front of this book? Take a moment and go back to the definition, and study all the aspects of the job campaign you have to master or be proficient in. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies would be hard-pressed to master or be proficient in that many disciplines. They have finance professionals, sales teams, IT departments, management personnel, and consultants to help them. However, most job seekers conduct the job campaign solely on their own.

Jacquetta Hawkes famously wrote that 'Every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves', by which she meant that Stonehenge has been a Druid temple, a landing site for flying saucers, or an astronomical calendar, according to the interests of the times. The same could be said about our stories about Vikings, and they have been alternately, noble savages, raiders, marauders and rapists, peaceful traders, entrepreneurs, explorers, early democrats, or IKEA sales personnel, according to what we want them to be.

Structured methods for learning Method Uses Useful for Organizational climate and employee satisfaction surveys Learning about culture and morale. Many organizations do such surveys regularly, and a database may already be available. If not, consider setting up a regular survey of employee perceptions. Useful for managers at all levels if the analysis is available specifically for your unit or group. Usefulness depends on the granularity of the collection and analysis. This also assumes the survey instrument is a good one and the data have been collected carefully and analyzed rigorously. Structured sets of interviews with slices of the organization or unit Identifying shared and divergent perceptions of opportunities and problems. You can interview people at the same level in different departments (a horizontal slice) or bore down through multiple levels (a vertical slice). Whichever dimension you choose, ask everybody the same questions, and look for similarities and differences in people’s responses. Most useful for managers leading groups of people from different functional backgrounds. Can be useful at lower levels if the unit is experiencing significant problems. Focus groups Probing issues that preoccupy key groups of employees, such as morale issues among frontline production or service workers. Gathering groups of people who work together also lets you see how they interact and identify who displays leadership. Fostering discussion promotes deeper insight. Most useful for managers of large groups of people who perform a similar function, such as sales managers or plant managers. Can be useful for senior managers as a way of getting quick insights into the perceptions of key employee constituencies. Analysis of critical past decisions Illuminating decision-making patterns and sources of power and influence. Select an important recent decision, and look into how it was made. Who exerted influence at each stage? Talk with the people involved, probe their perceptions, and note what is and is not said. Most useful for higher-level managers of business units or project groups. Process analysis Examining interactions among departments or functions and assessing the efficiency of a process. Select an important process, such as delivery of products to customers or distributors, and assign a cross-functional group to chart the process and identify bottlenecks and problems. Most useful for managers of units or groups in which the work of multiple functional specialties must be integrated. Can be useful for lower-level managers as a way of understanding how their groups fit into larger processes. Plant and market tours Learning firsthand from people close to the product. Plant tours let you meet production personnel informally and listen to their concerns. Meetings with sales and production staff help you assess technical capabilities. Market tours can introduce you to customers, whose comments can reveal problems and opportunities. Most useful for managers of business units. Pilot projects Gaining deep insight into technical capabilities, culture, and politics. Although these insights are not the primary purpose of pilot projects, you can learn a lot from how the organization or group responds to your pilot initiatives. Useful for managers at all levels. The size of the pilot projects and their impact will increase as you rise through the organization.

For the company with the three-year plan to double market share, the premortem headline is “Company Fails to Reach Market Share Goal; Growth Again Stalls.” Members of the planning team now imagine delays in new products, loss of key executives or sales or marketing or technical personnel, new products by competitors, adverse economic developments, paradigm shifts that could lead customers to do without the product or rely on alternatives not on the market or in use, etc.

been designed to research the spread of the Spanish flu. Comparing that disease with YARS was a fascinating exercise, as was comparing the world it devastated to the one that existed today. The very name “Spanish flu” was just another lie foisted on the world by America. The truth was that the disease had first taken hold in Kansas City military outposts. It killed more U.S. troops during World War I than combat, spreading easily in the cramped conditions that prevailed on ships, battlegrounds, and bases. The initial reaction of the medical community had been slowed by its focus on the war, but when the scope of the threat was recognized, the country had pulled together. Surgical masks were worn in public to slow the spread of the disease. Stores were prohibited from having sales to prevent the congregation of people in confined spaces. Some cities demanded that passengers’ health be certified before they boarded trains. There was no denying that the United States and its citizens had been strong in the early twentieth century—accustomed to death and hardship, led by competent politicians, and informed by an honest press. So much had changed in the last century. The American people were now inexplicably suspicious of modern medicine and susceptible to nonsensical conspiracy theories. They were selfish and self-absorbed, willing to prioritize their own trivial desires over the lives of their countrymen. Their medical system, designed less to heal people than to generate profits, would quickly collapse as it was flooded by desperate patients and abandoned by personnel fearful of being infected. And during all this, America’s politicians and media would use the burgeoning epidemic to augment their own power and wealth. That is, until the magnitude of the crisis became clear. Then they would flee. The sound of a truck engine pulled him from his contemplation and he turned. His people, disinfected and wearing clean clothing, climbed into the vehicle and set off into the darkness. Halabi bowed respectfully in their direction, acknowledging their sacrifice and the enormity of the journey ahead of them. After the long drive to Mogadishu, they would board a private jet that would take them to Mexico. From there they would be smuggled across the northern border.

The only people in any enterprise who ever describe anyone except the people who buy the enterprise’s products and services as “customers” are IT personnel. The only people in the enterprise who ever talk about “aligning with the business” are IT personnel. (Maybe the head of sales has talked about aligning her function with a new strategy or a new value proposition, or the head of manufacturing has talked about aligning with new key performance indicators—but aligning with the business?) That view can’t be good for IT. It is a legacy of the

Large retailers need to develop models for getting close to people like Sharad Kaka. Spic and span stores, glitzy surroundings, English speaking personnel and above all, the security and the uniformed staff, obviously don’t seem to do it. The unfamiliarity of this format, its association with authoritarianism and policing, turns away many people who would actually stand to benefit from the many sales on offer at any point in a modern store, sales that can be far richer in quality compared to the normal kirana store.

The burgeoning government sales not only provided profits for the chip makers but also conferred respectability. “From a marketing standpoint, Apollo and the Minuteman were ideal customers,” Kilby said. “When they decided that they could use these solid circuits, that had quite an impact on a lot of people who bought electronic equipment. Both of those projects were recognized as outstanding engineering operations, and if the integrated circuit was good enough for them, well, that meant it was good enough for a lot of other people.” One of the major pastimes among professional economists is an apparently endless debate as to whether military-funded research helps or hurts the civilian economy. As a general matter, there seem to be enough arguments on both sides to keep the debaters fruitfully occupied for years to come. In the specific case of the integrated circuit, however, there is no doubt that the Pentagon’s money produced real benefits for the civilian electronics business—and for civilian consumers. Unlike armored personnel carriers or nuclear cannon or zero-gravity food tubes, the electronic logic gates, radios, etc., that space and military programs use are fairly easily converted to earthbound civilian applications. The first chip sold for the commercial market—used in a Zenith hearing aid that went on sale in 1964—was the same integrated amplifier circuit used in the IMP satellite.