Application Article
Summer 2007
51
Thoughts from Gerhardt Gschwandtner, founder and
publisher of Selling Power Magazine
By Dan C. Weilbaker
The Journal of Selling & Major Account Management will be providing a series of interviews with major figures in the area of professional selling. As the inaugural article attempting to connect with the thought leaders in the
area of professional selling, I thought it was
appropriate to interview and get some perspective from Gerhardt Gschwandtner.
Gerhardt was gracious enough to provide me
time on December 3, 2007. The following are
excerpts from our interview. It is hoped that
this type of information will be useful and
stimulate conversations on teaching, researching and professionalizing sales. To that end, a
brief summary will be provided at the end of
the interview commentary.
Dan: One of the things I wanted to get your
impression on, besides you, who are the current “thought leaders” in professional selling?
Gerhardt: Honestly, I have no idea. We have
a pool of about 1100 so called sales gurus and
sales experts and when you talk to them, everybody has a very clear slice of the big pie, but
we don’t have any one thought guru that
clearly understands the entire pie. The need
to identify an authority on one subject in such
a complex and dynamic environment is chancing an illusion, it’s just not possible. For example, if you’re at a meeting and you put a dime
on the table, the dime represents the amount
of knowledge you could accumulate in a life
time about professional selling and you know
also that the table is growing every day, so
even if you were to double your capacity of
applying all the subject matter, the dime becomes a quarter, but you have only doubled
the circumference of your ignorance.
Dan: Has there been any particular person or
people who have had the most positive impact
on selling in the last five years?
Gerhardt: No, I don’t think there’s any one
person. There are a lot of people out there
from different schools. It’s a big dialogue, a
big community, and there are a lot of voices
out there. There are Zig Zigler, Brian Tracy,
Tom Hopkins, and the newer voices like Jeff
Gitomer. Those voices have a certain perspective on professional selling, but society
has shifted from looking up to authority and
people are more interested in collaborative
efforts and co-creation. It’s like Wikipedia
which is all about co-creation. So I think we
have officially reached the stage where there’s
no single authority out there and people want
to get information as needed, like they go to
Google to get the name of a restaurant or they
go to Wikipedia to identify a complex process.
Dan: In your opinion, has there been anything that’s had a negative impact on professional selling in the past five years?
Gerhardt: I think that I would like to finish
with two thoughts. There is always negativity
associated with professional selling. Professional Selling has a negative image and we
have not been able to move past that. Selling
has not formally become a profession yet.
Despite your efforts in your educational community, there are only 35 universities that offer a degree in selling in America and there are
over 4,000 colleges that don’t recognize what
those 35 colleges are doing. So I think to me
it’s negative that people don’t recognize that
selling is 75% science and 25% art. There are
19 million sales people in the United States
and only maybe 20% or 25% are true professionals. The characteristic of a professional is
that they continue their education throughout
their lives. They are also capable of teaching
what they know. Articulating and teaching
what they know.
Vol. 7, No. 3
52
Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
The other negative that’s also a positive is the
whole area of technology that is related to selling. There are so many new technologies introduced to the sales profession. Four years
ago a company that had a choice of about
800-900 technology solutions but today, four
years later, we have about 19,000 technology
solutions. But when you look at the sales statistics over the last four years, you see a flat
curve. You don’t see any improvement. So
the question is “why hasn’t sales productivity
improved?” With all that technology in place,
every one of those technologies was supposed
to improve productivity, but in reality is doesn’t. So the answer is that any technology piece
is like an only child that’s spoiled by two parents and doesn’t want to collaborate. They
want to be the center of attention. Every
piece of sales technology out there, they don’t
really want to collaborate with all the other
technologies. I have an iPhone that doesn’t
want to collaborate with Verizon. I can give
you a lot of examples like that. Technology is
a negative to me because the technologies
haven’t found out how to collaborate with
other technologies to help sales people to
work smarter, not harder.
Dan: Do you know of any companies or any
industries that are making proactive decisions
where they’re actually preparing for the mass
exodus of baby-boomer salespeople?
Gerhardt: Honestly, I don’t know of any
companies that specifically have a strategy for
doing that. Every sales force needs young
people to look at the future with bright eyes
and they often need the older people in order
to be a guiding force to remind people of
what they’ve learned from their experience in
the past.
Dan: I see some numbers that say there
will be a 3 million person deficit even if
everybody that was able to go into sales
did go into sales. Any thoughts on how
companies can handle or prepare for this?
Northern Illinois University
Gerhardt: I’ve talked to a company that has
1600 sales people and needs to hire 400 more
next year. They’ve had disappointing results
using a recruiting firm and the traditional
sources are no longer satisfied with them and
they say, “we are thinking outside the box”,
and I’ve heard success stories that say “well I
met a bartender who’s now making $50,000”.
There’s a lady immigrated from Afghanistan
who, two years ago was cleaning restaurants
and they said they related to her social skills
and now she’s making $130,000 plus. Somebody said, literally, they hired a forklift operator who became an account manager. So the
art of spotting talent, we have to wear a different set of lens and not just stare at the same
talent pool that we have looked at before.
Dan: So immigration will be part of it, nontraditional sources, you know looking inside
of your own company.
Gerhardt: I don’t want to mention this either,
but teachers are a great source for sales.
Teachers don’t make a great amount of money
and they know how to do great presentation
and how to educate their customers.
Another good pool is the Military. They focus
on ex-marines and ex-navy people and they
have a wonderful amount of skills. Leadership skills, process skills, execution skills, and
the teamwork skills that is so critical for sales.
A lot of them are fast learners and they can
quickly learn the other skills that are needed
by the company.
Dan: What do you think about Universities as
another non-traditional source for some companies? Non-traditional because a lot of companies just don’t hire from university setting
because they are looking for some experience
or a certain set of skills.
Gerhardt: Well I think that the universities
that teach sales have a great advantage over
them because they teach them how to cold
call or use sales letter or use a CM tool or
handle objections or how to close. Those
Application Article
candidates are prime candidates and I think
that what needs to be done is, the success that
you have had at your school needs to be
shared with the 4,000 other colleges that don’t
teach sales.
Summer 2007
53
The other trend is that companies created customers. This is about to change. In the future, it’s going to be the other way around.
The customers will create companies.
Dan: What do you think that the trends are
for inside (telephone) business-to-business
selling and outside? Are there trends? I know
five years ago there was a huge influx in inside
sales. Is that waning? Is that still going strong
vs. the outside sales person?
Dan: Do you have any particular views or
opinions about the teaching of professional
sales in the university setting? You mentioned
earlier that there are very few, but is this a
positive thing? Should the people who are
teaching it be academically qualified as well as
business qualified?
Gerhardt: Well, there definitely is a trend towards both. You have to analyze sales incomes. What do customers want? They want
to buy online, they want to buy over the
phone and they want to buy face-to-face.
Companies increasingly want their customers
to buy the way they want to buy. That’s the
future of the sales profession, really. A lot of
stuff has moved online already and it has not
diminished the need for or the number of
sales people. What we have seen in our research is that the manufacturing sector is decreasing. They are selling more now, with
fewer sales people, than they were 3 years ago.
The service sector is expanding dramatically.
There is continuous need for great service
sales people and the skills that they’ll need to
have as well as business acumen.
Gerhardt: I think that, as I said earlier, we live
in an age that intelligent collaboration is our
future. Our future depends on that. Our
world is moving away from the model of the
single authority. We noticed this in our magazine about 3 years ago. When we do cover
stories on people and personalities, they no
longer have the impact where people inhale
that “let’s learn all about Donald Trump”.
People aren’t interested in a single source of
authority. They are interested in a multitude of
ideas and points of view. So when you’re
teaching in a university I would bring in more
real-life voices and have more discussions
with the VP’s of sales, with sales managers,
with sales trainers, with CEO’s who could coteach with the professors. I see the role of the
professor more of an orchestra leader than an
opera star.
A lot of the information technology has limited and locked out the knowledge advantage
that salespeople have had in the past, but what
they’re looking for is the business acumen.
Understanding more from the customer’s
dashboard because sales people go out and
their purpose is to create a customer. How do
you create a customer? By helping the customers win. So, how do you help a customer win?
By looking at what’s on the customer’s
dashboard, which means you have some business insight to the customer’s numbers, to the
customer’s profits, to the customer’s way of
doing business. So that’s the way future sales
are made.
Dan: What are some of the issues that are
keeping some of the academic research from
reaching the field?
Gerhardt: Well, I’ve read some of the academic research papers and there is a lot of science and a lot of work that goes into it. However, the outcome, the net take away, requires
such a huge effort for a sales leader to begin
to adapt that it doesn’t have a chance of getting read. It’s not immediately accessible and
my suggestion would be…if the academics
were forced to create a one minute elevator
pitch on their research paper that in 60 seconds communicates what the content is and
Vol. 7, No. 3
54
Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
why it’s important, you would get a lot higher
reaction. Because people do have a minute
and if you add a short concise intro to the research paper you’d get a lot higher reaction.
You know if they would be able to create
Cliff’s Notes for the research or a one page
executive summary that clearly spells out the
benefit, then they would sell a lot more research. They would find a lot more sponsors
and readers.
Dan: Unfortunately it’s not the sponsors that
we’re worried about, speaking as an academic,
it’s the tenure process that really gets to us.
There are only certain journals recognized by
the university. I know there are limitations
because I have to deal in that world too.
That’s one of the reasons that Northern Illinois University has decided to publish the
Journal of Selling and Major Account Management. We felt that the objective of trying to
blend together the academics and the practitioners was a worthwhile thing. We’re trying
to tell the academics that, “Ok, you’ve got to
put the science in it, but let’s really beef up the
managerial implications and give salespeople
and sales managers something that they can
use.
What advice would you give to me as a new
editor of the JSMAM, that is looking at both
academic and practitioner issues? Is there anything we can do to better marry the academics
and the practitioner as far as professional selling goes?
Gerhardt: You have to look at the assets that
the practitioner brings to the table and the
asset of the academic. Now the academic obviously has a different perspective on everything, but it’s more methodical, more detailed,
it’s much richer. It’s like comparing a 20
mega pixel camera to a cell phone camera.
The academic is the 20 mega pixel camera. It’s
high resolution. But on the other hand, the
purpose of taking a picture for the practitioner
is not for getting those details. They are communicating on another channel. They use the
Northern Illinois University
phone to make conversation, to sell ideas and
install confidence. To merge the two it’s like
oil and water.
Dan: How do we get the emulsion made? We
need to shake it up and get them, one dispersed within the other. Is there anything
that, as the editor of the journal, that I could
do to facilitate that?
Gerhardt: You are held hostage by your own
kind because they want to get published, they
need to get published and they need to have
some evidence that they’ve done their research and documented that. It’s manufacturing, but the end-user that you’re talking about,
that you’re trying to help, is not interested.
They are more interested in “what can you
show me today that is related to my reality
today?” You’re mixing virtual reality with real
reality. The only way out is to create a dialogue to supplement the magazine. So, to
make the magazine live and have the journal
be relevant is to meet the constituents and
have real conversations with them.
Dan: What, in your opinion, are the greatest
challenge facing sales people today?
Gerhardt: It’s always the same. It’s not standing in the way of the sale. Sales people always
want to have a silver bullet. We need a silver
bullet. The thing is that you can give up the
notion of the silver bullet when you respect
the golden rule. The golden rule is “sell the
way the customer wants to buy”.
Dan: So that’s what’s getting in people’s way?
They don’t sell the way the customer wants to
buy?
Gerhardt: That’s right. They either don’t understand the customer’s needs, or they don’t understand the customer’s psychology, or they don’t understand the customer’s economic power, or whatever. There’s a lot of misunderstanding because a
lot of sales people think that knowing the product
and knowing the benefits will help them sell, but it
doesn’t. The customer will help you sell.
Application Article
Dan: What are the challenges that you think
will be facing sales people in the future?
Gerhardt: One of the biggest is how to integrate technology. How do we manage change
for yourself and your customer? How do we
grow as an individual? People like to be in a
groove. The magic is not how can I become
successful, but in a consistent success. One
kind of success is a shooting star. The consistent success is a shining star. And that’s what
people need to strive for. The skills for making a one time success are completely different
skills for becoming that shining star. Consistent success not only requires a methodology,
but also an ongoing commitment to changing
and growing and looking at the world all the
time and continually search out what is possible that people say can’t be done. So if you
are constantly attracted by searching for the
possible that can’t be done, you’ve got it
made. A lot of people are afraid of that. This
is what the sweet spot of success is.
Dan: Those are basically most of the questions that I had. Any more parting shots that
you want to give me? That you would like to
expound upon in an article?
Gerhardt: One thought that we have hinted
on, is that selling is about the whole person
and not just…you can’t wear a professional
mask. You have to develop a professional
identity. And as a professional we talk about
the entire person. It means that you can manage yourself as a person in a professional way
that you have an exercise routine that you
watch what you eat, that you conduct yourself
as an outstanding citizen, that you are known
for making an outstanding contribution to
society, so that the entire persona stands up as
an example to others. That is something that
a lot of companies don’t pay attention to. A
lot of companies have a corporate culture that
defines them, it’s what they stand for, this is
our code of conduct, and this is how we collaborate. But in essence, what customers respond to is not the bells and whistles, but they
Summer 2007
55
are buying from an individual, a person who
they trust. I think that we trust people that
don’t over promise and under deliver, we trust
people who practice ethics. But also, we trust
people where we get the impression that they
are people of value or people of substance.
People that are going to be there when you
need them. Those are the people that we can
go to when there’s crisis. That’s what I mean
by, try to be a person of value. Then you have
much more credibility in the value creation
process for the customer.
Major Conclusions
After reflecting on Gerhardt’s thoughts there
were four major issues that emerged to me.
The first dealt with sales as a profession. That
is there are so many different types of selling
positions and so many ways to sell that there
is no single thought leader or issue that could
have all of the answers. Professional sales encompass a wide variety of activities and responsibilities. There is little in the way of decision rules or written in stone criteria that make
sales people successful. I often tell my students that professional selling in not a cook
book. Success depends on addressing each
situation properly. Maybe that is why salespeople are so highly paid?
The major issue appears to be professionalism. Even though sales is not viewed as a
profession yet, there are definitely a move in
that direction. One negative area that still
plaques the profession is that the popular media never depicts salespeople as ethical or customer centered. Until that change the sheer
mass of people influenced by the negative
stereotype will prevent the profession from
being positive. The positive area that has
helped is that several universities, including
the University Sales Center Alliance, are making a positive impact on the perception of the
salesperson. Sales students are learning that
sales are more about the customer and less
about them. Gerhardt felt that even though
this was a positive impact the sheer numbers
Vol. 7, No. 3
56
Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
of schools that do not teach professional selling will keep the image negative for a long
time.
The third issue dealt with how to replace the
retiring baby-boomer salespeople. Gerhardt
feels that the traditional methods will not be
sufficient since the demand will be so much
greater than supply. Instead non-traditional
areas need to be explored. Some of those areas are ex-military, immigrants, teachers and
universities that teach professional selling.
Finally, the biggest issue for the future is getting technology to work together so that salespeople can sell more efficiently. This will allow
for more co-creation and collaboration between the salesperson and customer. With
out salespeople and customers working together there is little hope that sales will go beyond the negative perception that salespeople
are out for themselves and not the customer.
Dan C. Weilbaker, Ph.D., is McKesson
Professor of Sales at Northern Illinois University.
dweilbak@niu.edu.
Northern Illinois University