I Hate Doing Sales - The Importance of Sales Skills to the Success of Your Organization

The Goal of this article is to show how every organization has and needs a sales operation. Sales are involved in every function within the organization. Sales skills are critical from presenting an idea to top management and obtaining funding, strategic partnerships to the outright sale of your product or service.

Many times when executives or owners of small organizations are asked if they have a sales operation, they respond that they do not. They say that their organization is too small to have one or that they do not have a product or service to sell. These answers are far from the truth.

Whether you call it customer interaction, business development or just plain sales, everyone in the organization does sales to some capacity. Any interaction with the purpose of building a relationship that ends in some kind of agreement to further a mutually beneficial business relationship uses sales skills.

Sales is the difference between reaching the goals of the organization and failure. You can identify, get in front of the perfect customer but if the person in the sales role does not have the confidence and/or the sales skills to ask for a commitment, all will have gone for naught.

The Quick Sales Assessment

Here are some questions to determine the effectiveness of your sales efforts:

• Who in your organization is responsible for interacting with the customer or strategic partner? Whoever fulfills the function is in a sales role.
• Does that individual like and/or skilled in the sales process? If not, there is no reason to go any further. The remedy is to get a proven sales person to do the job. We should devote time to our areas of strength not areas of weakness.

• Is the person interacting with your customers regularly asking for other people who can help reach organizational objectives? This is the referral system of success building. If the referral system is incorporated into your organization, cold calling will be unnecessary.
• Does the person interacting with the customer or strategic partners ask for a commitment for further action?

Sales Is the Bottom Line

The sales function resides in every organization. Profit or not for profit, service or product and even companies going for funding, sales skills are employed anytime a person interacts with another individual with the purpose of getting that other person moved towards a goal.

In the next issue, we will explore the components of the typical sales model and how it applies to various functions in the organization.

Mark Parbus is President/CEO of Unlocked Potential. Unlocked Potential teaches executives of small to medium sized businesses to administer CPR to the organizations. In this case, CPR means increasing Cash, Productivity and Retention of key personnel.