It’s Not the Tools That Make the Salesperson

It’s not the tools that make the salesperson. It’s the salesperson that makes the tools. It’s important to know this and to not pretend otherwise.

Where Tools Make No Difference

A poorly trained, poorly developed, and poorly coached salesperson can only perform poorly even when provided with the best tools (or even the best territory). This is true also of salespeople in name only, those who haven’t embraced sales and who aren’t really salespeople.

You can give a poor performing salesperson access to all of the tools that Sales 2.0 offers, and it will not improve their results. They can tweet, plus, link, like, and stumble around on the Internet, to no avail.

Give them the best leads, the best laptop, the best smart phone, the best sales force automation, the best mobile hotspot, and the best sales collateral ever printed on four-color glossy paper, and they will fare no better.

You can even give poor salespeople the best product, best service, best solution, and the world’s greatest value proposition and they will still be outsold.

No Tools Required, But Well Placed

On the other hand, you can give an excellent, well-trained, well-developed, and well-coached salesperson almost nothing in the way of tools and they will still create and win deals. Their ability to win deals relies on a different set of tools, chiefly their ability to create value for their clients.

An excellent salesperson can leverage their ability to sell, their ability to create value, by using the tools that they are given. The Sales 2.0 tools are put to better use because they aren’t being used to compensate for the salesperson’s shortcomings. Instead they are used to demonstrate and share their ability to create value for their dream clients.

A great salesperson won’t need your best leads; they’ll produce them. If you give them the best laptop, smartphone, sales force automation, mobile hotspot, and sales collateral, they’ll put it to good use, but these external accouterments won’t be nearly as important to their results as to what is inside them.

It’s not the tools that make the salesperson successful. It’s something else that isn’t nearly as easy to provide them. There are no shortcuts here, and there is no amount of money you can spend on tools to produce a better result.