Task vs. Purpose?
Published on July 28, 2000
As a sales executive, are you more concerned with the number of calls your sales people are making or the quality of their calls? If you are more concerned with the number of calls, then you are a task-oriented leader. If you are more concerned with making quality calls, you are a purpose-oriented leader. If your sales people are making calls simply for the sake of making calls, they may be considered to be master prospectors. But they will be below average in first impressions and qualifying accounts. They tend to start the sales call with lots of features, functions and benefits; simply going through the script hoping that what they have to say is going to catch someone’s interest. Task oriented sales people tend to have lots of customers who in fact produce below average market share for the sales executive. Purpose oriented sales people are just the opposite. Obviously they prospect to keep the funnel full. Where they differ is they do not lead with features, functions and benefits. Instead, they excel in first impressions and qualifying. They ask enough of the right questions to find out what’s important to the customer, a technique that automatically starts to position them as an invaluable resource to the customer. Titans are purpose oriented sales people who are there to make a difference in the lives of their customers. This way of selling generates higher revenues per sale, higher profit margins and increased market share.
Posted in Sales Management