Under the Skin, and in the soul.
Publicado em 23/05/2024
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Everything would be easy if it didn't need to be sold. The world never asked for anything, changes, innovations and transformations.
It all happens because someone sells, through special marketing techniques, what the customer didn't know they wanted until the sale took place.
The same thing happens in agribusiness that Steve Jobs once declared: “The consumer doesn't have time to know what they want”. Life history helps us a lot to exemplify this assertive comment.
I started working at Jacto in 1976, a time when no one wanted to buy low-flow, low-pressure sprayers. It was exactly the opposite!
Nobody asked for coffee harvesters either, which were launched in 1979 and for no more than half a dozen curious customers.
At Agroceres, very few farmers used hybrid corn seeds at the beginning of the 1980s, when the consumption of selected forage seeds was low, almost non-existent.
The rejection of Agroceres pig technology, in a joint venture with Inglesa Pig Improvement Company , was brutal at the turn of the 70s and 80s.
In the same way, efforts to develop the genetics of the new Agroceres Ross chicken, in a joint venture with the Scottish company Ross Poultry, were also rejected. Breeders , not to mention many other examples.
Direct planting, then, was seen as a “crazy German” thing. And how they suffered “ Agribullying ”, Bartz and Frank, none other than the creators of direct planting in Brasil.
So the mission of sales teams is vitally important in companies that, without great salespeople, directly or indirectly, contribute to delays in science.
Yes, therefore, researchers, scientists and all those who see mandatory fundamental innovations in advance, given the aforementioned delays, complain and become distressed when their experiments do not reach the field at the necessary speed and capillarity.
So, without a doubt, between the “Skin and Soul” of great salespeople, whether men or women, there is a body, a pulsating organism, that is, the organization itself.
Administration, Management, competent recruitment and selection programs, adequate training, dynamic remuneration formulas, customer targeting, business sales planning, for example, are fundamental parts of this reality.
However, be careful! In unstructured companies, you will find unknown products, delays in paying salespeople's salaries, among other weaknesses.
Moreover, interestingly, you will find in these same companies, few salespeople who produce much more than those working at organised and well-structured companies.
There is a short percentage of human beings who carry the art of selling under their own “skin ” and, thus, manage to attract people and customers with a gigantic power of empathy and uncommon sense of life in their own “salesperson's souls”.
In a group of 100 salespeople, we will find about 5 who act completely outside the box. They are professionals who do don´t limit themselves to sell what the customer wants to buy, but sell what the customers didn´t know what they wanted or need to buy. This kind of salespeople are the true “Sales Wizards”.
This special category of salespeople changes the world and serve as differentiating examples between great commercial performances versus average sales.
Identifying and retaining legitimate sales champions is vital, and keeping them as effective members of the sales team is essential, as they have the power to positively influence and inspire many teammates.
However, these “outside the box” salespeople aren´t easy to deal with, so it is up to the area CEO to understand them and exercise the art of “Leadership of the Different”, maintaining a proper strategic and constructive dialogues to guarantee a fine and proactive tune.
Therefore, pay extra attention to the “different” people, those passionate for what they do for the company and for their clients. It´s about “Demand Creators”, the Sales Wizards.
And very pertinently, there is much more attention to pay to women in sales, who are more and more increasingly present and shows high level competence and performance. Yes, they are and are increasingly powerful!
In Agribusiness there are those types of salespeople who only meet the customer's needs, that is, they only focus on what the customer asks and needs. These are the known “Order issuers”.
On the other hand, there are those who I call “Skin and Soul”, those who see beyond and sell what the customer does not yet want. These, in fact, are the ones who are already building the customer of the future and driving development, opening space for Science, researchers and enhancing Agribusiness.
During my professional career, I managed thousands of sales professionals at the largest sales machine in the country, the OESP Mídia, a branch from Estadão Telephone Directory operation, a large Brasilian media company.
Our mission was door to door style, to sell what no one wanted to buy! Thick and heavy volumes with hundreds of pages and millions of phone numbers and lots of ads! And how much we sold!
We carried our mission within our souls bearing in mind the awareness the goals we needed to achieve and fulfill, that is to sell, and oversell.
We were salespeople with sales “under the skin” with no fear of going where we needed to be, carrying out hard work in the largest city in Latin America.
What an unforgettable and fabulous experience!
José Luiz Tejon.
