I want to take some time in this edition to philosophize a bit about the sales profession.  I enjoyed the years I worked for Bruel & Kjaer more than I can express.  In a sense, I was carrying on a family tradition, as both my parents were salespeople.  They worked in retail, graduating from jobs at Macy’s Department Store in New York City, to ownership of their own store in Brooklyn.  While selling women’s fashion might seem a far cry from selling scientific instrumentation, many of the principles are the same.  First and foremost is the need to identify the customer’s need and knowing what the best solution you can offer.

Personal Promotion

Selling can often be a tough business .  You need to be able to handle rejection and go on with your efforts to make the next sale. 

At an early stage I learned from my manager that in selling, the first thing to sell to a customer is yourself.  You want to prove yourself to be a good source of technical, product, and industry knowledge (the last while being very sensitive to NDAs). This takes hard work, especially in the instrumentation area.  You naturally need to be well informed about your company’s products and applications but also know when to call for support and from whom in your company to get this support.  Understanding your customer’s problem and showing empathy is key.  After selling yourself, the next step is selling the company you represent.  The customer needs to be comfortable that the company will back up their products in the future, that they produce products which have value appropriate to their price, and that they have a history of serving their market and leading their field. Only at this point does the time come to sell the product, as being an appropriate solution to their needs.  Self, Company, Product.  You may not always have the right product, but if you regularly review the market, you will be able to recommend a product that DOES meet your customer’s needs.  Don’t be afraid to recommend it.  It will help you sustain your standing as a primary source of knowledge to the customer and ensure that the next time he has a need, he will come to you first.

It’s a great feeling to win a sale.  But it can be equally demoralizing to lose one.  I soon learned that one needed to be thick skinned in this game, and that being thick skinned required, subconsciously, flipping the order outlined above.  If I lost a sale, it was easier to think that the product didn’t fit the need, or the company didn’t have the reputation in the specific area/application to make the customer comfortable. As the last reason, I could blame myself for not meeting my responsibilities.  Fully true or not, it always helped in lost sales postmortems.

Truth and Consequences

The last area brings us to a quote that sounds rough at first, but before you react let me explain.  “Customers Always Lie.”  I think it was my first manager at Bruel & Kjaer who told me this.  What he meant was that the salesperson needs to be aware that customers will often bring up objections to a proposed product/solution or explain why they bought from another vendor that are often not 100% true (Customers Often Lie, just doesn’t have the same impact).

“My manager told me to buy from XYZ company.”

“The solution didn’t fit our budget.”

“We decided to spend capital on another project.”

“We needed a wider frequency range transducer (lighter device; lower noise floor; faster computational speed, etc.)”

What I soon realized was that customers often made an excuse for not buying that reflected in part, their desire to make the rejection less personal.  They were uncomfortable with the real reason and instead provided a less truthful reason.  They were embarrassed that they had used your valuable time and then did not reward you for that time (in truth these customers were often better than those who were always calling you with questions but never bought anything).  It is useful to talk to the customer and try to parse out the “real” reason for the decision.  It will undoubtedly help you in the future.

It Could Be the Next Google

Let’s discuss another principle of selling that I always followed using an experience I had in the early 1990s.   One day I was given a message by my secretary.  I had received a call from a Professor at NYU (New York University), the large college located in Greenwich Village close to my alma mater, Cooper Union.  I returned the call.  The Professor explained that he ran a laboratory in the Neurophysiology Department that did experiments using white rats.  Some of the experiments involved auditory stimuli and recordings of vocalizations to evaluate effects of drugs.  Rats have hearing in the ultrasonic region (as high as 40 kHz) and this poses a measurement challenge.  The Professor had been awarded a grant which finally allowed him to invest in quality instrumentation for the laboratory.  He had called Bruel & Kjaer because, in his words as best as I remember them after three decades, “Bruel & Kjaer was the only company that would always respond to our requests and phone calls with information and answers and help despite the fact that we have never had funding to buy anything.”  I remembered visiting the lab in the past and fielding multiple phone calls from various professors at the University, but the records did reflect a dearth of sales.

We discussed their needs and I drove into Manhattan several days later with some demo equipment and visited him to further discuss their requirements and desires.  At that time, Bruel & Kjaer’s analyzers were 70-pound self-contained units, with integrated raster scan displays, so sales calls in NYC always required a handcart or dolly to get from the nearest (often not very near) parking garage to the customer.  It was an investment in time, money, and labor doing a demonstration in NYC.

We had a good meeting and soon after I submitted a quotation for two analyzers and a number of high frequency quarter inch microphones. The total value, after a university discount, came to about $100,000.  An order was received based upon the quote shortly after.

I continued to visit the professor and about ten years later, the laboratory upgraded their systems to Bruel & Kjaer’s PC based solution, PULSE.  Being a Macintosh based computing community at the school, they were a bit disappointed that they would need to buy a PC compatible, but their faith in Bruel & Kjaer’s quality and the high level of support I had provided in training, troubleshooting, and just stopping by when in the area sold them on sticking with us as they graduated in their instrumentation requirements.

The lesson learned was that it is wise to treat all customers as if they might provide the next big sale or become the new key account as legacy key accounts fade (see my essay- Sales Philosophy Musings: Corporate Life Cycles, Sales Cycles and the Parking Lot.)

Let me end with the humor I promised at the outset.  It is a story about an early presentation I made at a sales meeting at the U.S. headquarters. At the time I was in charge of promoting the company’s sound level meter product line. I was pitching a new sound level meter by explaining why it was a worthwhile successor to a classic product made by Bruel & Kjaer. I always felt that humor made a presentation memorable, so I decided to end with a joke.  I had some hesitation regarding the joke before the presentation assessing how it might be received, but I eventually went ahead with it. I put a toothbrush on the overhead projector, its image thrown on the screen and began.

“This is the story of a sales training class, and one attendee new to the selling game After several weeks of in classroom, discussions and training, it was time for the fieldwork/final exam so to speak. All the attendees were given several boxes of toothbrushes, and they were told to go out into New York City and sell them.  At the end of the first day, they returned. Several attendees had sold 10 toothbrushes, some 20, some 30. One attendee came back having not sold any toothbrushes at all. On the second day when they returned some had sold 10, 20, 30, and even 50 toothbrushes.  The same one attendee came back with no sales at all. This was repeated on the third day and on the fourth day.

With the final day of the course coming up, the instructor sits down with this one attendee and explains “you need to identify the need in the customer and then present your product as a solution to the need. If there is no need, you need to create it or at least convince the customer that he has that need and then again present the product for the solution. Okay?”

The next day they all go out to sell toothbrushes. The regular cast comes back having sold 10 20, even 75 toothbrushes and this one attendee who had failed to sell any previously comes back having sold nearly 500 toothbrushes. Everybody is amazed, and the instructor asks him for an explanation.

“I kept what you told me in mind.  I went to a grocery on the way to Grand Central Station and bought some sour cream, onion soup, and potato chips.  I also picked up some dog droppings that I saw on the street. In the station rotunda, I set up a table with a bowl filled with a mixture of the sour cream, onion soup, and dog droppings with a bowl of chips next to it and a sign that said FREE CHIPS AND DIP. When people walked by, they would pick up a chip, put it in the dip and eat it. They immediately spit everything out and exclaimed “it tastes like dog sh##” to which I would reply, “It is, can I sell you a toothbrush?”

Fulfilling a need is a basic rule in selling a product. I am sure my colleagues will always remember that.