Sometimes the best sales people don’t ‘do’ sales.
Posted by Mitch on 4th December 2015
RELATIONSHIP MANAGER
£65,000 + BONUS
DICTATE IT
LONDON NW5
Just for a moment think about real life, that thing you do outside of work. Think about the people you go to for advice. The people you trust.
When you were a kid it was the person responsible for providing cornflakes and clean socks. You trusted them because they knew you and your daily trials.
As a teen you perhaps trusted a teacher or a sports coach. They knew what you needed to get to the next stage. They were able to anticipate your next hurdle.
Then you learned to trust Police Officers, University Lecturers, life-long colleagues and mates. They knew your world, they were experts in their field, they were confident, able to hold court and think for themselves. They maybe taught you that most tired of clichés; ‘how to think’.
Now you might trust a talented Doctor, a great Mechanic, a Politician (long shot, admittedly), a renowned and decorated Scientist. Each one of them is effortlessly confident and each knows their own subject. If you want advice on a product or a service, you know you can trust them.
These are all superb sales people. But not one of them works in sales.
A good sales person (let’s say somebody who sells cars) hits targets, has tenacity and has a quick wit. A truly great sales person (and this is where we hope you recognise yourself) calmly and confidently gets on with being a trusted expert.
So we’re not sure where our next great sales person will come from. We’re not even necessarily looking for someone who is ‘doing sales’. We’re looking for a consultant, a person with intellectual curiosity, some academic rigour and an effortless charm that engenders trust.
So you might be a University Lecturer. You might be a Detective. Maybe you’ve just done your first TED talk on your specialist subject and it really wasn’t that big a deal. Maybe you’re a Civil Servant, used to briefing rooms full of Journalists, able to assimilate large amounts of information and build trust. Maybe you’re one of the Journalists. Maybe you’re a Recruitment Consultant, an Architect, a Banker or a TV Producer.
We just don’t know. And that’s really exciting for us.
But it’s a huge opportunity for you.
We need someone to drive our sales efforts. Our lead-times are long. There are no weekly targets and you probably won’t sell anything for the first 6 months.
Yet we have the best products in the market, a very smooth sales process and we’re growing every year. It will take time for you to identify, understand and get in front of them – so you’ll need to understand their personality, their world and their work.
This is not the kind of sales job where you’re hitting the phones in a boiler-room environment, whooping and hollering when you do a deal. You’ll be sat reading their journals, digesting their papers, treating their life’s work with the respect it deserves.
You’ll need to know what’s important to them. We make technological solutions purely for NHS Trusts.
We produce technology that can take dictated notes, can recognise voices and can automatically produce and distribute that information – in short, it takes away huge amounts of pain from our clients. So you may not even have ‘sales’ experience per se, but you will need a deep love of technology, an empathy with, if not a professional interest in medical work and be partial to a game of chess.
That’s not strictly true, there are other board games. But a mind that is attracted to long, strategic, demanding pursuits will devour the information and revel in the complexity of our work and the end-user simplicity it can create. And if you do play chess, you’ll almost certainly go for a ‘prepared variation’ rather than the King’s Indian Defence. If you play an hour of Flappy Bird each night, unless you’re rewriting the code or getting over 300 each time, it’s probably not going to work out.
You can find out about our business here. And we expect you to do your homework thoroughly. We’re currently developing products that use speech recognition, NLP/ASR and Deep Neural Networks. Ideally you’ll know what most of that means without reaching for your iPad. But don’t be disheartened. If you can search, digest, assimilate and convince us at interview then you’ll be proving a key strength, rather than merely claiming it.
So who are you? We’re intrigued to know.
What industry are you in? Where does your enthusiasm for technology and medicine come from? Who comes to you for advice, and why? Where are the Youtube links to your last public-speaking engagement? Why do you want to do this rather than what you are comfortably doing now?
Don’t be ashamed to say ‘challenge’ or ‘something new’ or even ‘money’. All three will more than match all but the most rapacious sales environment. If your job title doesn’t currently include the word ‘sales’, this extraordinarily rewarding role could transform your lifestyle and give your enquiring mind some much-needed exercise.
Get in touch if this sounds like you.
Comments
By aLan on Tuesday, 08 December 2015what a load of childish rubbish!
By Mitch on Tuesday, 08 December 2015
ALan, nice use of irony.
Was it deliberate?
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