Don't blame the Salesman

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Don’t blame the salesman!

I once heard one of the champions of British industry berating his sales force. "The problem with this business, (he said) is our bloody salesman, they couldn't sell their way out of a paper bag”.

When I say heard, I actually mean heard whilst watching an early reality television programs in which a “Trouble-shooter” visited businesses and (usually) enabled a remarkable turnaround by his razor like insight into all things business. The business in trouble was Apricot computers in Birmingham and the man berating his sales force was one of my heroes at the time, Roger Foster founder and driving force behind Apricot Computers plc.

This was the man who had almost single-handedly given the UK a computer business it could be proud of. At the time my small and extremely insignificant computer business was an authorised Apricot dealer! Something I'd worked very hard to achieve and so if old “Rog” said something, it tended to get my attention, as far as I was concerned the guy was a God. But I have to say on this point, I disagreed with him. What's more Sir John Harvey Jones the famous Trouble-Shooter himself also did.

The problem for Apricot was that they were trying to compete in a manufacturing world that (as we now know) was always going to be dominated by those pesky tiger economies of Korea, Japan and all things Far East. Apricot never had a chance. Sir John spotted it and said so, “Rog” with, no doubt a huge emotional attachment to the company he’d built found it hard to accept, and so, blame the salesman! Easy, neat and simple to justify. I think nowadays we’d call it “closure”.

Just look at the facts, Apricot were trying to compete in just about the most competitive market in the world. Having taken on one of the biggest industrial giants ever seen in IBM, it now had to compete with cut-price competition from the Far East. Companies whose history and infrastructure were geared to low-cost high-tech production, whose home economic climate, philosophy and culture gave them a huge competitive advantage. Apricot was ultimately purchased by Mitsubishi who, as I recall the time, were the fourth biggest company in the world.

So the real reason for the company's relative failure was nothing to do with salesmen, but everything to do with product and, in this case price. Apricot might have been able to produce great computers, but it simply couldn't produce them at the right price. Try getting a salesman to sell £20 notes for £21 and you'll get the idea.

Any businesses sales effort is underpinned by three elements, Sales, Marketing and Product. The trouble is they're what I call "serially connected", in other words if either one of them fails then the whole system breaks down! You can have the best salesman in the world backed by great marketing but if you have a lousy product, rest assured although you might get some successes, ultimately you will fail.

Let's look at some examples

Suppose you make ice-cream, what's more you make pretty good ice cream, perhaps not the best in the world but overall a good product and reasonably priced. More

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