The Connection Between Selling and Teaching—Not What You Think

By Lindsey Tishgart | September 22, 2015

Numerous articles have been written how teachers are salespeople of ideas or, on the flipside, how salespeople act as educators for their buyers. I’d like to take a look at another less obvious tie between the two professions that’s emerged in the last several years: the limitations we place on them.

Earlier this year, a former Brooklyn teacher wrote an op-ed for the Daily News about her time as a public educator. It focuses on her struggles with standardized tests as the emphasis on them gets higher every year. These tests would ideally measure a student’s progress and help make sure that that student is learning and staying on track relative to their peers. Instead, the tests give teachers less time to teach, and force a rigid curriculum to prepare students for the test, which administrators have found have questions above the student’s grade level.

Despite the curricula that teachers use being standardized, the test scores that students get make up nearly half of the teacher’s evaluation. The students themselves are faced with complicated questions that have no shades of grey for the answers: “fully correct”…or nothing. As Mrs. Browning says, “In reality, [tests] have become tools to reward and punish students, teachers and schools.”

Reading through the piece, I kept being reminded of the burden placed on many modern salespeople. Let’s take a look at each part of the equation that connects selling and teaching.

The Customer

Like this new focus on test results and students’ actual needs, all too many companies lose sight of what’s really important: the customer. Mrs. Browning concludes in her piece that with standardized testing, “learning becomes a passive act.” The same happens to companies who view their customers as a statistic in their quarterly report. While this may have worked twenty years ago, it won’t today.

Students may not have another option to learn, but buyers do. It’s the Age of the Customer, which means that buyers have quick and easy access to tons of information and content. As Forrester says, buyers are “independent, active agents,” not passive vessels. If salespeople aren’t giving them the information that’s specific and meets their needs, the buyer won’t hesitate to dismiss them for another company that does.

The Salesperson

Despite many companies adapting to the Age of the Customer, an alarming number are lagging. In the race to sign a contract, salespeople aren’t provided the tools that they need to connect with the modern buyer, relying instead on materials that aren’t intended for one specific buyer, but for “the buyer” at large.

Like the teacher struggling to teach a class full of students with different learning styles and strengths, the salesperson is tasked either with presenting a scripted generic deck and hoping for the best, or spend their already limited time trying to create new materials that might work for their next meeting or searching through libraries of materials for the perfect combination.

And who gets punished despite lacking the right tools to meet the needs of the modern customer? You guessed it; the salespeople and their managers.

The In-Person Meeting

It’s time for companies to empower their salespeople. Instead of giving them a standard curricula and punishing them when it doesn’t work, salespeople should have access to the right materials for the right customer, not just generic materials for the generic buyer.

Ideally, they take it a step further than simply enabling them with the right things. Selling should not be “passive.” In fact, people only remember 10% of what they hear, but they remember 80% of what they see and do. Engaging prospects will not only keep them active participants in the selling process, but it will get them to remember salespeople and their products long after they’ve left the meeting. The tools for our teachers and salespeople are out there; it’s just a matter of equipping them with the right ones.

Want to learn more about sales transformation? Click below to view our 5 Steps to Sales Transformation SlideShare!



Sales Transformation CTA


 


Subscribe to Mediafly's Blog


Comments are closed.