They say: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." I was reminded of this, when I uncovered some "pearls of sales wisdom" looking through the NCR Archives in Dayton last week. I was researching John Patterson's very first sales school in Dayton, which began April 4th 1894 (120 years ago this coming April). So I was reading "The NCR" an internal company newsletter where I came across the following quote from Patterson himself in the May 15th issue of 1894; " Our people are teachers rather than salesmen. It is the teaching of merchants how to do business and how to make money." I went on reading in the biography of Patterson by Samuel Crowther, first published in 1923, where he points out that Patterson believed; "We are not selling cash registers but rather helping customers with their business."
Does any of this sound familiar? I'm reminded of the "Challenger Sales" where salespeople are encouraged to be teachers, "commercial teaching" in their lingo and the key is to provide a unique insight to the customers business they had not thought of. Don't get me wrong. I believe the Challenger Sale is the next step in the evolving profession of sales but it is more a new technique. The premise of the salesperson as teachers and discovering the business problems of their customer , however is as old as the profession of modern selling is itself.
The reason I'm doing this research is that since retiring, after 15 years of sales training, most recently with IBM, I have made it my "mission", to do what I can to improve the sales profession, that I so love. To begin, I have chosen to work with colleges and universities to raise their awareness of sales as a profession and how they can modify their offerings and curriculum to better prepare young sales professionals. Future entries in this blog will highlight what I have learned and experienced on my "mission."
Saturday, December 21, 2013
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