The Death of True Salesmanship -- and How the Feds Fit In

by Angela Durden

Talk about weird. That’s when I knew something was changing and it wasn’t for the better. Time has proved me right. Here’s the story.

Fifteen years ago my phone rang. It was a man. He said he had received my business card from someone who suggested he call because I could help him. I thought the conversation was going quite well. He gave me information. I asked questions to clarify. We got all the way to the setting the appointment stage when he said in a quite derisive tone, “Well, I can tell you’ve taken XYZ Selling Course.”

I said no I had not; which I had not taken such a course. I was simply taking the logical path in such conversation as this, namely set up an appointment after finding out needs and wants and goals. Duh, right? Not so duh anymore, obviously.

He was furious and hung up with some choice words implying I was a manipulative liar like all sales people, and that was the end of that. While my brain told me that was a one-off conversation, my gut was telling me something important just happened and it would behoove me to pay attention.  

What was beginning to happen? Well, the B2B customer was changing. Within eight years of that conversation my business would be starving. Cold comfort that it is, at least I was not alone in this time of famine.

You see, there was a time I could go “door to door” and make nice with trusted managers who had real authority to sign the deal, talk up how choosing me to handle a process or deliver a product would make them look good and save the company money. I could be reasonably certain the deal would be honored by the company and I could make a profit. I was introduced to upper management, and was considered to be a solution provider that could save a company money while delivering a superior product and out-of-this-world customer service.

Which I was, which I had, and which I did.

International competitors in my space hated my guts because I knew what I was talking about and had the best interest of my clients at heart. These competitors requested meetings with me and my customers (since we had some overlap) and walked away trembling with fury when I could bring out documentation to prove that I was the better and why they were not. If they had been smart, they would have hired me to fix their problems. 

The loyalty of my customers to me was fierce and they were always happy to see me. I was often the only vendor allowed to sit in on corporate managers’ meetings with upper management and hear sensitive information. When invited, I showed up with spreadsheets of previous expenses in Category A (or B, C…) from Vendor Z compared to same categories from my company.

I worked closely with them to reign in costs, suggested ways to get more bang for their buck, and in the meantime made very good money myself without cheating or lying. 

I was proud of that. Wouldn’t you be?

But then I saw a disturbing trend. It started with managers at all levels rotating in and out like interchangeable decorative whirligigs. And finally the inevitable next person behind the desk refused to pay for product that had been delivered and I was left holding many thousands of dollars of debt to my vendors — which I paid at great sacrifice to myself.

After several years of being unable to count on seeing the same person twice in a row, or even having a signed contract honored, I stopped looking for new long-term business and have gone to very short payment cycles for established customers to pay-before-you-get from everybody else, including new corporate clients. But even that is not worth chasing anymore as the Internet has made so many things available in very short runs; the price against which in order to compete I would be spending a dollar to make a penny. That’s called going in the hole. 

So I, like millions, have been reinventing myself in this new economy. While it’s never been easy to sell, it is much harder now than ever before because those who are “empowered” (yes, the quote marks are for irony) to make a decision aren’t so empowered, and they know it. So they wait for a corporate system — these days often an investment group sweeping the funds out each night — to tell them what to do and when to do it and, pretty please, don’t think, just do what you’re told.

I wish my gut had been a bit more insistent and clear when it spoke all those years ago. Maybe I could have navigated the changes a little better. But then again, maybe not. I am a sole proprietor and use vetted-by-me vendors so that I don’t have to build production plants. However, even my vendors with hundreds of B2B customers and brokers such as myself, have gone out of business. My customers have gone out of business, and trying to replace them has been impossible.

So, yeah.  Who appreciates the role of a real salesperson these days? Nobody.

And yet whose employee count is growing?

The Feds. Many Federal employees who have no clue what business is like, are tasked with making rules that effect business. They then enforce those rules about being in business, trying to find business, servicing customers, how one can contact customers, and on and on. Then if you aren’t successful, who gets blamed? Why, the business owner, that’s who.

From sole proprietors like myself to international conglomerates, no business is safe from the Federal employees’ blind and slavish devotion to the notion that enforcement is the best job ever because, after all, hasn’t the U.S. Government told them they are smart and know better than we out here in the trenches?

To the gubment’s interference in business, add the above facts as I’ve outlined and you can see why even headhunters and recruiters cannot find true salespeople these days because companies don’t want them lest they…ahem, throat clearing…run afoul of some deeply buried federal mandate — usually driven by politically correct, environmentally friendly crap — that will put the company at risk of being sued by the Feds.

So, everybody’s getting screwed…and it’s not even fun anymore.