Virtual Selling

5The Asynchronous Salesperson

The inside sales professional I was coaching had been underperforming for a while. The year before, on a team of 30 inside sales reps, he'd been a top performer and made it to the President's Club. Recently, however, his productivity had dropped off and it had not recovered.

We were sitting face-to-face at one corner of a large conference table. I asked questions in an attempt to diagnose his performance problem over the last few months—a problem that, despite the evidence, he denied he had—the sad delusion of an underperformer.

I asked him to walk me through his day and describe his outbound prospecting process. I sat back in my chair in disbelief as he told me that his primary prospecting methodology was sending out hundreds of bulk emails to the buyers in his database each day.

Seeing the, “Oh shit, I can't believe you just said that” look on my face, he defended this practice. “It works,” he said, while barely hiding the defensive tone in his voice. “People respond to my emails looking for more information.”

I let him talk in circles, justifying why he wasn't talking with people, for a few more minutes before interrupting him. “Eric, here's the thing. If you are telling me that sending emails is the most effective means of engaging buyers and closing business, then we don't need you. It would be a lot cheaper to get a robot to do your job.”

The look on his face was that of a hurt puppy that had just been whacked with a rolled-up newspaper for ...