Sunday, May 20, 2007
The Cold Call Culture
This post is stimulated by messages posted in the Sales Practice Forum lamenting about Cold Calls and ab recent article I came across in HBRs Managing Diversity by, David A Thomas and Robin J Ely. "Making Differences Matter…A New paradigm for managing diversity" it says
The leadership must understand that a diverse workforce will embody different perspective and approaches to work, and must truly value variety of opinion and insight. We know of a financial services company that once assumed that the only successful sales model was one that utilized aggressive , rapid-fire cold calls. (Indeed, it incentive system rewarded salespeople in lare part for the number of calls made.) An internal review of the company’s diversity initiatives, however, showed that the company’s first ad third most profitable employees were women who were most likely to use a sales technique based on slow but sure building of relationships. The company’s top management has now made the link between different identity groups and different approaches to how work is done to get the best results.
It makes me understand that sales practices are not only affected by cultural differences between countries...they are perhaps more influenced by cultures within companies.
Also see article about the Fuller Brush Culture.
The leadership must understand that a diverse workforce will embody different perspective and approaches to work, and must truly value variety of opinion and insight. We know of a financial services company that once assumed that the only successful sales model was one that utilized aggressive , rapid-fire cold calls. (Indeed, it incentive system rewarded salespeople in lare part for the number of calls made.) An internal review of the company’s diversity initiatives, however, showed that the company’s first ad third most profitable employees were women who were most likely to use a sales technique based on slow but sure building of relationships. The company’s top management has now made the link between different identity groups and different approaches to how work is done to get the best results.
It makes me understand that sales practices are not only affected by cultural differences between countries...they are perhaps more influenced by cultures within companies.
Also see article about the Fuller Brush Culture.
