Roy Chitwood, president of Max Sacks International believes that today's sales environment is so difficult that companies should approach selling as a science and not an art. Max Sacks International is a leading sales and sales management training resource with a range of clients from IBM and Merrill Lynch to Coca Cola and Hughes Aircraft.

(Mark) Roy, what's wrong with sales organizations today and what don't sales managers know?

(Roy) Most of them don't know how to sell. I think, Mark, one of the things that continually amazes me today is I'll go into companies and they've got a manufacturing process, they've got an accounting process, they've got a data processing process and they leave selling purely to chance. That doesn't make any sense because the sales activity of a company is the only activity of the company that brings in the dollars. I think one of the things that sales managers don't realize is that for many companies they didn't really have to sell during the boom times of the 90's.

(Mark) Why? The business just kept rolling into them?

(Roy) Yeah, the business just was coming in. All you had to do was take orders and not mess them up.

(Mark) Right.

(Roy) And therefore, I think the newer people in a company don't know how to sell and the more experienced people, it's been so long since they've had to sell that they've forgotten how. I think any company's future will depend more upon its sales and marketing activities than any other activity of the business.

(Mark) Alright, now you talk about teaching selling as a science - a science versus what?

(Roy) Versus an art. Most people think that selling is an art. I believe that the art lies in doing the science. For example, we know that when a salesperson talks with a prospect that prospect has a hidden agenda. And this hidden agenda amounts to their buying decisions and they're going to always make those decisions in a very precise psychological order. Now we call it hidden because most prospects don't know that they're going through this process. I mean, how many times have you had someone say to you, "It sounded good but I just didn't feel right about it"? What that means is that one of those decisions has not been made in a very positive manner. And therefore what that does is place management in the unfortunate position of trying to manage various styles and personalities of their sales folks and that's almost an impossible task.

(Mark) Alright, we've all been through sales training programs and, you know, generally they don't work or they're a waste of time.

(Roy) I think there's two major reasons. Number one is we know that many companies today are buying Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation products thinking that they're buying a selling process. All these programs are are technology tools to use within a selling process.

(Mark) Right - to organize the relationship.

Yeah.

(Mark) Not to make the sale.

(Roy) Yes, exactly right. And the second reason is that companies confuse product and technical training as sales training. I mean, if you're teaching sales people how to use a software program to track sales leads that by no stretch of the imagination is sales training.

(Mark) Where do salespeople go wrong?

(Roy) The biggest weakness I have found with salespeople today throughout the world is the fact that they are product-centered and not people-oriented and tragically unaware of that shortcoming.

(Mark) There was a study, a very impressive study, put out by Pepperdine University based in Southern California, that basically endorses your whole process. Can we talk about that?

(Roy) This research involved 1,500 graduates of our Track Selling System™ Workshop. An amazing 60 percent of those graduates had a sales dollar increase of 25 percent or more. Can you imagine what would happen with some companies today if they could increase their sales, their topline by 20 or 25 percent and how that would impact their profitability?

(Mark) Well, it certainly covers your fee.

(Roy) (Laughs) More than that.

(Mark) Roy, thanks for joining us.

(Roy) My pleasure, thank you.

(Mark) That was Roy Chitwood, President of Max Sacks International in Seattle, Washington.