Is There an "Ideal" Salesperson?

“How would you describe the ideal salesperson?” When someone asked me this recently, the best answer I could come up with was “it depends.” So often, companies don’t take the time to profile their customers before they think about profiling their salespeople. And of course, there is a chicken-and-egg dilemma here—hard to profile the customer if you don’t have any because you don’t have any salespeople.

However, you do know what your target market is; you know your ideal customer. I try to think about how that customer likes to buy and extrapolate that to try to figure out the type of person that they will buy from. Do they want to have a business conversation at their desk? Do they just want to spec and order their products over the internet? Do they want someone to understand their business? Do they want someone who can speak deeply to the features and functions of the product they are purchasing?

It’s too easy to say “yes” to all these questions. Not all these things typically come in one packaged salesperson, nor would you want them to. I’m a big fan of what I call the “sales continuum.” What I mean by this is that there are all kinds of sales situations during a company’s lifecycle, and each has different needs.

At the beginning, the need is for customers. Pure and simple. The mission is to go out, find someone who will buy this product, implement it and validate our existence. Then do that again. Several times. What kind of salesperson do you need for this? You need a hunter. A hunter will go knock on doors, nay kick down doors, until someone answers and says “yes, I’ll try it”. That guy is not afraid of having people tell him no, is not daunted by the fact that so far nobody has bought this product, and is a quintessential sales hero.

Fast forward a year or so. Now, you’ve got momentum. You’ve got customers. All kinds of customers. You’ve seen some highly unusual implementations of your product, and you’re starting to see a pattern. Despite thinking you think you have a repeatable model you’re seeing lot of “one-off’s”, not the straightforward, repetitive implementations, that make your professional services department happy. Who’s your ideal sales guy or gal now? It’s the individual who can go out into the world and describe to new prospects how it’s been done in the past; why other customers are using your product, and why they should, too. Here is where you need the persuasive, business oriented salesperson, who isn’t knocking on every door, but is selectively choosing his customers and closing highly profitable, repeatable deals.

Fast forward again. You’ve got enough traction now that you should segment the market and go broader and deeper. You have a repeatable model, and now you’re looking for proliferation within enterprises, and larger, more complex deals. Guess what? Now you need a different set of skills. Your ideal salesperson now is a strategic thinker who looks at an account and sees a myriad of possibilities, and has the expertise to call high and move from division to division and department to department. He’s not knocking on doors at all….he’s leveraging relationships he’s built within the organization to introduce him and the product into the next arena.

So it’s not always simple. It’s situational. As a company and product matures, its sales force must grow and change as well. Sometimes that means painful choices; the sales force that puts a start-up on the map isn’t necessarily the sales force that takes it to world domination.

Author: Kathleen Gilligan