Boundary Spanners
Salespeople are “boundary-spanners” in an organization. They may spend more time with customers than with co-workers and have divided loyalties to their customers and firm. Since they see customers — in their setting or context — they have a view that no one else in the organization does.
Also to be discussed is the phenomena that services or solution sales people can describe their service in the same way: through its specifications, as opposed to describing it in relationship to the client’s requirements. One reason this happens is that sales management and marketing do not generate material which translate the service offering into anything more meaningful than a statement of work or service description document. The value translation is left to be sales field, which in some cases might require a greater degree of analysis than the field has time for.
The right mindset that a sales person should follow is to understand their client first, their company’s capabilities and their translation needs. The sales person then looks at their own company through the eyes of the client and works out what’s relevant or whether a service can be created which satisfies the client’s parameters.
To say that all salespeople are completely self-absorbed is an exaggeration. But I would argue that most behavior does work from the principles of selfish altruism. Selfish altruism is basically a win/win mentality. It is where helping you directly or indirectly helps me.
I would like to leave you with a recent post:
“Your best salespeople possess vast knowledge about how to connect with and motivate people – and perhaps take the company to the next level. But they rarely get to share their knowledge with senior managers. “