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It’s Only Common Sense: Why Salespeople Are Forced to Farm Instead of Hunt—and What We Can Do About It

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about why it seems to be so hard to get PCB salespeople to focus on any aspect of selling, from lead generation to closing a sale. It makes our job as sales consultants particularly daunting since we are in the business of coaching salespeople to success. Most of the time we cannot get these PCB sales professionals to take a deep breath and spend some time focused on trying to be better salespeople.

Some time back, I-Connect007 offered a unique prospecting tool called BoardBuyers.com, which I personally felt was an outstanding way to locate PCB buyers and what technologies they bought, enabling the salesperson to get in touch with the right people and try to sell them their boards. It was a terrific program and it worked very well for a few very good salespeople who understood the idea and made it work for them. The rest of the salespeople I heard from just complained about the program, for various reasons. But in my opinion, they didn’t like it because the program made them accountable. Their sales managers could see who was using it and how much time they were spending on the program. Man, they hated that.

But before we join in a complete condemnation of PCB salespeople, let’s pause to get a better idea of why they hate spending their time prospecting and generating leads: By its very nature, selling PCBs should be a hunter’s business rather than a farmer’s business, but not because salespeople must cultivate an ongoing relationship with their customers. They live and die by their company’s performance. Their ability to get that next order, and that follow-up order, depends wholly on how well their company is performing. And because most PCB houses don’t always perform that well, the salespeople are forced to spend their time tending to their current customers rather than out hunting up new ones.

The PCB salesperson’s success is directly proportional to how well his shop performs. It doesn’t matter if the salesperson is the best in the world if his company cannot get a quote out on time or build and ship a quality board on schedule. No amount of prospecting, lead generation, or sales skills are going to make much of a difference. And that’s why they spend so much of their time working to make sure that their company is performing well rather than selling.

One can argue that they could just ignore their company’s poor performance and get out there and find new customers, but that is hard to do when you know that sooner or later those customers are going to be disappointed. In short, if we want our salespeople to sell the way we want them to, the way they should be selling, we must take care of our customers. We must make sure that we are delivering the best products and services on the market today thus freeing them up to be hunters instead of farmers.

I have heard some of you say in the past, “Well, if we were perfect, we wouldn’t need salespeople; customers would just come directly to us and buy directly from us.” But that is simply not true. If your company was performing well and doing everything it is supposed to be doing, the salesperson could do his job. If he could count on your company to pull its weight, like getting quotes out on time and producing quality PCBs and delivering them on schedule, then the salesperson would have time to be selling instead of apologizing—hunting instead of farming. They would be more interested in finding ways to win over new customers instead of worrying so much about keeping the ones they already have. They would be selling like we want them to.

PCB shops must focus on providing customers with the very best service, the very best value that money can buy and then and only then will our salespeople be free to sell to their heart’s content. Only then will they be free to do the job we are paying them to do.

It’s only common sense.