The death of field sales is greatly exaggerated

Mark Twain once said, after reading his own obituary in a local newspaper, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Another “death” currently is being widely publicized: Field sales. After seeing a number of business articles regarding the devaluation of outside sales, I sat in on a webinar by Justin Roff-Marsh, a “thought leader” in sales process engineering principles. The session was titled, appropriately, The Death of Field Sales. I was curious as to why suddenly there are a number of sales and selling pundits who believe that the position of field sales is obsolete.

Roff-Marsh began his webinar by saying that there are three wrong assumptions about sales:

“All these assumptions are wrong,” said Roff-Marsh. “Sales is primarily an inside function and the days of sales as an outside function are over—the sales conversation starts inside.”

Seventy to 80% of revenue generated involves conversation, and most of that can be handled by customer service reps (CSR) that attend to inbound calls and e-mails, process orders, and generate quotes. Other CSRs triage all inbound calls, traffic that Roff-Marsh calls “second-tier specialists.”

Roff-Marsh admits that there are many companies that “are not selling from-stock products, or products that do not exist or are not even conceptualized yet,” which require a team consisting of sales, production and engineering. “We don’t argue the effectiveness of salespeople travelling around their territory and having face-to-face meetings, but a good salesperson can only do about four meetings a day versus 30 calls a day that an inside salesperson can do,” said Roff-Marsh. “Ninety percent of sales is administrative, customer service and prospecting, rather that engaging in meaningful selling conversations.”

To make the most of a salesperson’s time, companies need to have a queue of prospects in the pipeline so they don’t have to perform the administrative or prospecting work. Seventy percent of that work can be done by CSRs handling inbound calls and e-mails and generating quotes, so the salesperson doesn’t have to be involved in those activities. “A team of CSRs can process transactions and send to inside salespeople only those functions the CSRs can’t handle,” Roff-Marsh said.

Roff-Marsh suggested that for a company with $10 million in annual sales, two inside salespeople can perform seven to eight times the activity of five field salespeople. The nature of field sales, he said, can be narrowed down to specific activities such as product demonstrations, customer training and problem solving. He even suggests adding a field generalist to analyze a spectrum of problems, making the position a “specialty to work in the field to support the inside sales team, which is the more effective and efficient way to work.”

One point Roff-Marsh noted is that typically outside salespeople spend most of their time inside anyway, “but are hideously unproductive inside if they are used to being outside salespeople.” One answer might be to add a salesperson who “pursues enterprise opportunities—major opportunities or complex buying opportunities,” he suggested. “In those types of cases, it would be beneficial to have salespeople doing face-to-face selling.”

Several of Roff-Marsh’s activity descriptions define sales in the moldmaking or molding business. Moldmaking typically always involves complex buying opportunities and high-dollar, high-value custom products. Industrial or B-to-B selling of these types of custom products can best be served by face-to-face selling. Yet, it appears from what I’ve learned over the years that finding good outside salespeople is one of the most difficult positions to fill.

It’s almost always true that outside salespeople who are really good at their job really hate to be sitting behind a desk in an office filling out paperwork. That’s where a good inside salesperson and CSRs can come in handy.

Face-to-face selling has many advantages, particularly when it comes to technical sales such as machinery and equipment. It was interesting to me that Milacron noted in its latest conference call to report its quarterly financials that the company will be adding more field salespeople for face-to-face selling to increase its aftermarket component business and provide overall customer support for processing and maintenance.

While Roff-Marsh offered some good suggestions with regard to CSRs and inside sales functions to support outside sales, the death of face-to-face sales has been greatly exaggerated. As I’ve said for many years, people do business with people—they don’t do business with companies. Face-to-face selling is far from being dead.