ABSTRACT
In the old world of selling, a salesperson departed the office in the morning and hopefully returned in the afternoon with newly signed contracts in his or her brief-case. As long as the contracts kept coming in, what happened between the salesperson’s departure and return was of little consequence to sales management. Although this mode of selling was once an acceptable way of life, it has fallen out of favor with sales management for at least two good reasons:
1. This is not a teachable, repeatable way to sell. Consequently, it cannot be leveraged across a sales force or used to train new salespeople when they come on board. If sales management has no definition of how they want their salespeople to sell, then their only means of improvement is to fire the least productive salespeople and roll the dice on the next. Formal sales processes allow a company to scale its sales force by teaching its salespeople how to succeed.
