During the thousands of miles he logs on the road each year, Michael Shanley keeps a laptop computer by his side, using it, with the skill of a research librarian or a journalist, to constantly gather the latest information off the Internet.
Shanley, however, isn’t in a profession that most people think involves much research or analytical skills. He’s in sales.
“I would like to dispel that old stereotype of the slick, fast-talking salesman that kind of scared everyone,” said Shanley, outside salesperson for Liebovich Bros. Inc., in Rockford. The company is a subsidiary of Los Angeles-based Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co.
Ed Harms, senior vice president of sales for CareerEngine.com, an on-line recruiting company, says amen to that. “The Willy Loman, whose stock in trade was a shoeshine and a smile, is the antithesis of the modern, solution-oriented salesperson,” he said.
If the leaner, meaner business climate of the past decade wasn’t enough to kill the three-martini-lunch, glib-talking salesman, the epitaph is now being written by the burgeoning world of e-commerce.
Indeed, one of the chief aims of the new dot-com world is to bring buyers and sellers of all types of goods and services together in cyberspace. The salesperson, traditional middleman between buyer and seller, is an endangered species, except for those who learn how to add real value to the transaction. Sales people who can do that are turning the job into a higher-paying, more-skilled profession. According to government statistics, 16 million people, or about 12 percent of the workforce, hold sales jobs in this country. Those most likely to be supplanted by e-commerce, said Jon Hawes, director of the Fisher Institute for Professional Selling at the University of Akron, hold low-paying, low-skill sales jobs. Actually, added Hawes, it’s a misnomer to term many of these low-paying positions “sales” jobs in the first place. “Really, these are order-taking positions.” It’s the people answering phones to take customers’ orders who are likely to go the way of the door-to-door salesman, who disappeared a decade or two ago when women left the homefront, asserts Hawes.
Michael Lavelle, an Evanston-based salesperson for Getinge-Castle Inc., a hospital equipment company headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., agrees.
“We are hearing a lot about how salespeople will go by the wayside (because of e-commerce). And that is true for commodity products, where customers are looking for the best price,” said Lavelle. “But it’s not true for the bigger-ticket items. In my business, hospitals might shop for commodities like rubber gloves and gowns on the Internet. Buying surgical equipment, though, is complex and requires lots of planning.”
Like Shanley, Lavelle is rarely without his laptop and he’s always hopping on the Web to check e-mail, track the progress of customers’ orders and seek out news on the hospital industry, among other tasks.
In fact, the Internet is a two-edged sword for salespeople, said Allen Konopacki, president of Incomm International, a research and sales training company in Chicago. On the one hand, the Web is slicing some sales jobs, but at the same time salespeople are using the net to provide deeper and more comprehensive services to their customers.
The result, according to Konopacki and other experts, is that effective salespeople in these new complex roles are in demand, with the potential to earn more than ever. “We have a broader range of compensation levels for salespeople today,” Konopacki said. “We have long been finding them in the $50,000 bracket, and more and more, I’m finding salespeople in the $250,000 bracket.”
Salespeople who earn six-figure salaries are most likely to work in the business-to-business arena, said Konopacki. While consumer-oriented retail sites were the first wave on the Internet, B2B sites are now revolutionizing business purchasing, with sites emerging on which companies can buy everything from paper to steel.
A corollary trend is that companies are reducing the number of vendors they do business with. “Vendors are no longer just salespeople. They are now strategic partners with their business customers,” said Konopacki.
Lavelle and Shanley can point to numerous examples of how their day-to-day worklife is now different than it was before the Internet explosion.
“I would go out on the street and sell a product and then let the in-house people handle the rest,” said Lavelle. “Salespeople didn’t use to have a lot of connection to the office. Now, with the Internet, we are connected and we can track shipping and delivery. We are more connected to the processes at the home office and we are also a partner with the customer. Sometimes, in fact, the customer may want us to tap into their computer system for tracking and follow-up.”
And Shanley said the sales cycle is now shorter. “If you use the computer more effectively, you will be able to stretch yourself out more and call on more people,” he said. “You can use the Internet, for example, to send clients product and market information by e-mail. If you know the price of stainless steel is going up in the next 60 days, for instance, that is something you send your customers.”
Shanley adds that while his business customers use the Internet to purchase, he also uses it to determine prime sales prospects. “A salesman spends a lot of time qualifying customers, or figuring out whether a business manufactures products that would entail the use of our products. We used to have to look in manufacturers’ directories. Now, you can easily pull this kind of information off the Internet, and you can do it quickly.”
With sales increasingly involving research, analysis and problem-solving, many people who think they’re not aggressive enough for sales may be missing opportunities. A librarian or an accountant could conceivably find a niche in sales, experts say.
“The demand for talented salespeople has never been keener,” said Harms of CareerEngine.
A Chicago-based Internet company, BidBuyBuild.com, has certainly found that it requires a human sales force to get its e-commerce site, where builders can purchase supplies and equipment, up and running.
“The human touch is needed to explain to builders how to use the site, and to verify to manufacturers that they will be dealing with legitimate builders and contractors,” said Bob Stockard, president of Salience Associates, an Andover, Mass., sales outsourcing firm. Indeed, Stockard says that in the world of e-commerce, he expects more companies to contract with firms like his, whereby a sales staff can temporarily boost Web sales via old-fashioned human skills.
To help their sales force become more effective in these changing times, Konopacki says industry surveys show companies are spending more each year on sales training.
Although the B2B arena is where more of the higher-paying, complex sales positions are found, in many cases, selling to consumers is also evolving because of e-commerce. “I see e-mail in my sleep,” said R.J. Serpico, Internet sales manager for Arlington Heights Ford. Customers often start shopping on the Web, he said, and e-mail him to inquire about options and prices.
Many of the same processes are still involved in selling cars, said Serpico, but they are now altered somewhat due to e-commerce.
For example, salesman and customer have long negotiated over the price of a vehicle. Now, customers can glean a clear idea of what the dealer has paid for the car on the Internet. Some people will take that figure and still haggle, even asking for a price below what they know the dealer has paid, said Serpico. Others will tag on a few hundred dollars, deeming that is a fair dealer profit. The salesman is still negotiating with the customer, only now the talks are probably more specific on dealer costs, he said.
“The speed and pace of the economy is quickening and there is a need to manage more and more information, ” said Harms. “It has all changed the role of the salesperson.”
