By Fernando Sierra for staffingamericalatina

A lot has been written about the main skills to be traced in a seller, particularly about those who have the responsibility of managing clients on a daily basis, of being the face of the organization.

There are plenty of analysis, most of them with scarce scientific basis that discuss about the acceptable or recommendable skills these people should own in order to properly perform. Some even try to explain how the new roles associated to sales’ management and development must adapt to the new world that surrounds us, doing all sorts of projections about their evolution towards the future.

Anyway, the main concern for defining an adequate professional profile is based on the need to recruit a key player for the commercial process. The sort of player who has the transactional function of “closing the deal” and is also one of the main marketing tools of the company.

The professional salesman, in any of its possible variations, must follow the evolution of sales and do a proper analysis of them (which is the first indicator of consumption behaviour). He also must become a problems solver and a developer of new ideas that directly impact on the business growth of his counterpart, the client. By properly developing skills of market information feedback (for the organization) and business support (for clients), these individuals shall contribute to the growth of economic transactions for the organization throughout time.

A professional profile with these characteristics questions the organizations about the decisions to make regarding a particular sales-team and the specific elements to consider when recruiting talent.  Decisions aimed at putting in the first place the long term relationship with the clients, focusing the efforts on duties that enable maintaining clients efficiently. Furthermore, recruiters must consider indicators that are detected and measured during entrance interviews for positions in sales.

As an initial conceptual consideration, it is important to take into account that the act of selling is not a primary transactional act of a particular good or service. It is basically an idea. The goal is that a potential or current customer acquires a specific interpretation of a very small portion of reality, which is materialized in a product (either a good or a service). The salesman must understand the client’s needs and offer the best possible solution to satisfy such needs.

The transaction shall occur when the interpretation is not unilateral (a result of an imposed act), but rather when it is the result of an interaction between two individual positions (that of the salesman and that of the buyer). This is a joint and social construction. It is the consequence of how we operate in our relational lives as individuals, of a mechanism that builds our personality: we produce ideas that are the result of several transactional mechanisms with other individuals, with the sole retribution of feeling that we belong and participate in the reality that surrounds us.

At this stage, commercial ideas are only ordinary ideas that reach a certain level of evolution and individuals who sell should become key actors in the process of understanding clients’ needs. The stepping stone is a preference that should become evident in collaborative relationships.

This particular skill of collaborative construction, which is developed with learning and experience, is the skill to be looked for when recruiting positions related to daily management and development of sales. An individual skill that is superficially revealed to the unaware observer in the person’s rich or diverse personal history or his/her ability to relate with other people. This skill is actually developed through the execution of several specific skills such as nonlinear knowledge (intuition, gathering signs, empathy, etc.), creative cooperation, efficient communication and other types of knowledge which are set apart from the analytic-rational thinking. This set of skills results on a superior connection of the salesman with his/her client during the commercial transaction. In any kind of relationship, these sort of connections entail tangible benefits for the individual; in the commercial area it results in bigger sales due to a sustainable long term relationship.

Even though this skill of collaborative construction may be applied in every area, (it is a key skill for any person who works in sales), it seems to have a particular impact in services’ transactions. The intangibility of these products seems to enable a sort of spontaneous relationship between the quality of how it satisfies needs and the performance of these specific skills related to nonlinear knowledge by the person offering the service.

The question recruiters must ask themselves is whether they have the tools and processes needed to quickly detect the collaborative construction skill.  They could even ask themselves if they are orienting their radar to detect this key skill. This is particularly important as it is really difficult to train this skill once the candidate is hired (as these kind of skills are developed in very long periods of time and tend to be part of the person’s personality).   

We know how important it is for an organization to have quality connections with its surroundings and how this contributes to generating a healthy business. But this capacity is developed through a primary trend or inclination of the organization to establish relations with the environment, which is neither positive nor negative. However, it really depends on the organizational front-office for the company to reach a constructive characteristic.

Even though salesman are not the only members that represent an organization for the community, the responsibility to relate with the environment with the highest strategic weight lies on their shoulders: researching, recruiting and tending to the needs of those who are vital to the business, the clients. Necessarily, a main share of the relational capacity of the organization rest on the hands of these people.

The demands of an ever changing social, economic and political environment have become more aggressive and challenging. The organization’s duty is to stay alert and active in order to interpret the environment. It must also adjust its response. Consequently it needs to develop an inclination to relate in a positive way and empathize with the environment.

The sales individual is key to develop this positive relational capacity of the organization. Having the right tools and certainty to detect collaborative construction talent is a strategic decision that organizations should make in order to assure the future sustainability of the business within a market that will demand answers that better suit its needs.

Fernando Sierra is Sociologist (USAL), MBA (UCEMA), and a specialist in Commercial Management and Development.