Why Salespeople Earn More than Customer Service Personnel

In the end, there are only two things that separate salespeople from customer service personnel and it those two things that make selling so much more difficult.  Salespeople have to talk to strangers and gain commitments.  Everything else is customer service.  And while customer service is important, it is not as important as selling.  Customer service is about taking care of existing customers. But if a salesperson does not make a prospect a customer in the first place, the customer service person doesn’t have anyone to serve. Selling comes first.

In the book entitled the Hard Truth About Soft Selling by George Dudley and John Tanner, the author’s point out that according to a popular college textbook about selling, it costs 10,000 times more to reach potential customers via personal face-to-face selling than with television ads.[i] They then ask the question why, given the enormous cost involved,  any corporation would bother to marshal a personal selling force in this age of mass communication?  Simple.  “While a well produced commercial may be memorable, entertaining, and image enhancing, it can’t close a sale.  Advertising can create a positive mental relationship between a customer and a product, but it can’t ask for the order.  And while millions of people may see a television commercial, the number who actually buy as a direct result is substantially smaller and, furthermore, unknowable.  A salesperson with a specified quota and a realistic “hit” ratio takes the sales process out of the realm of psychobabble and places it in the land of bottom-line accountability.” [ii]

“In the final analysis, you can’t depend on relationship-building skills alone to make a sale for you.  Hone these skills and make them work for you.  But don’t confuse making friends with making sales.”[iii] “The ability to obtain commitment to take action is the endgame of selling.  If you do everything well except for this, you will still fail.” [iv]

In the real world, “in addition to meeting your customer’s objectives, your professional objective as the seller must remain the same: to close the sale.  If it’s not, you’re wasting your time.  You’re wasting your company’s resources.  And, you may be doing your clients a grave disservice.” [v] “Functionally speaking, successful selling is what gets salespeople rewarded (paid in the form of commissions and bonuses) when they do it, and punished (sacked) when they don’t.”

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[i] George Dudley and Dr. John F. Tanner, Jr., The Hard Truth About Soft-Selling (Behavioral Sciences Research Press, 2005). p.27

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid. pp.24-25

[iv] Brian Tracy, Advanced Selling Strategies (New York: Fireside Books, 1993) p. 174

[v] Dudley and Tanner, pp. 27-28

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