Let’s Put Some Lipstick on This Pig? Practical and Innovative Insights for the Selling Professional

Citation

Grassl, W. (2004), "Let’s Put Some Lipstick on This Pig? Practical and Innovative Insights for the Selling Professional", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 21 No. 1, pp. 73-75. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363760410514021

Every year several dozen new trade books on selling are published in the USA alone. Though nearly all of them target the same audience – active and aspiring sales professionals, sales managers, and trainers – they are of widely different quality levels and formats. Many trade books are little more than lists of do’s and don’ts, with not much backing by a psychological model that would underpin the recommendations or, in the worst cases, not much thought as to how sales fits into the marketing function of firms or other corporate tasks. Every so often, however, there are exceptions to this rule, as books on selling emerge that are far above mediocrity and make good reading for sales practitioners and marketing academics alike.

Mark McGlinchey, a successful sales trainer in Indianapolis and CEO of a consulting firm focusing on business development, has written such a book. It is a small, self‐published volume with a provocative title. At first sight, its structure, content, and format remind one of the many trade books on sales and selling. It guides the reader through the principles of managing his or her own conduct (Part 1), the buying cycle (Part 2), and the selling cycle (Part 3), and finally concludes with the “Sales Manager’s Handbook” (Part 4). There are “Six Principles of Sales Management”, a few exercises, a glossary of sales terms, and lists of negotiation tactics and sales tactics. And, interspersed throughout the book there are quotations from famous personalities. All this seems conventional fare.

At second sight, however, this book is different. What strikes the reader most is the absence of pretension and empty rhetoric. There is no claim to turn anyone into a sales professional after a few hours of reading. There is no pseudo‐scientific jargon of “fractal organizations”, “spiral marketing”, “complexity theory”, “non‐linear thinking”, or the “postmodern consumer”. The author gives his advice not in a technical language but in that of everyday business practice. There are only very few graphs and tables. But for all its simplicity the book is a treasure trove of wisdom based on the author’s long experience in sales, sales management, training, and consulting.

Consider the following example: “Stop trying to get your prospect’s money. You are not out to sell anybody anything. You are on a sales call to try to uncover a problem for which you, most likely, have a solution” (p. 95). Academic marketing management textbooks say the same things clad into the language of the marketing concept, customer relationship management, value creation, and customer satisfaction. But it is doubtful whether this can make a simple yet important point any clearer.

Another respect in which this book sticks out from the business literature is the absence of conditional advice. The author does not beat around the bush. He uses an apodictic language of black and white, do and don’t, success and failure. His is not a book that tries to save everybody’s feelings: “I believe only 20 per cent of salespeople are worth hiring” (p. 129). And he does not present training as a panacea where the necessary personality type is missing: “The formula for developing a great sales force is 40 per cent hiring, 40 per cent good skills training, and 20 per cent management. Therefore, finding and interviewing candidates correctly is of utmost importance” (p. 126).

Nor is McGlinchey a friend of what has been called “psycho babble”. A good salesperson is not a “self‐actualizer”, one who can realize his true personality or act on his innermost feelings. Much more realistically, he gives the following advice: “Don’t be who you are, be who they want you to be” (p. 37). Or consider this recommendation on hiring (which most sales managers will appreciate though some academically trained human resource managers might frown on it): “The wrong ad will over‐emphasize the company’s vision, the super benefit package, corporate culture, work environment and being a part of a team. All of the things that a wimpy salesperson, who is looking for a place to hide, will love” (p. 127).

But McGlinchey’s book is not only an exercise in hard‐nosed, down‐to‐earth realism about sales devoid of flowery language. It is also based on a simple but convincing model of matching prospects’ buying systems with selling strategies (pp. 93, 97, 102, 107, 110). Academic textbooks might call this matching a “structural homomorphism” or the like, might make graphs more complex than simple box diagrams – but would most likely not say any more or provide any deeper insight for salespersons who want to learn about buyer behavior and about what works best in selling. This book is recommended to those who have embarked on a sales career or want to do so. It should be ideal background reading for sales trainings. But it is also recommended to those academic teachers of marketing and sales management who, from time to time, need a little hard reality as an antidote against too much abstraction.