Portrait Of The Ceo As Salesman

An ex-strategic planner and Harvard Business School graduate makes the case against 'marketing'

Tweet

YEARS AGO, WHEN THE BOSTON BEER CO. WAS JUST getting up and running, I received a phone call from my uncle, a partner at Goldman, Sachs and one of my initial financial backers. He asked me how things were going. Fine, I replied; the first batch of Samuel Adams beer was in the aging tanks and would be ready for delivery in about five weeks.

"So," my uncle continued, "what did you do today?"

I told him I'd spent the day shopping for a computer system. When he asked me why, I explained that I figured I'd need a computer to keep track of sales, payables, and the like.

"Oh yeah," he said, "sales. By the way, have you got any?" I admitted that I did not.

"So what the hell are you doing buying a computer?" he demanded. "You know, Jim, I've seen a lot more businesses go broke because they didn't have enough sales than I've seen go under from lack of computers. Why don't you work on first things first?"

That shook me up. My uncle went on to describe his early days at the investment firm -- how frightened he had been then to have to make cold calls on potential customers, how he had forced himself to set a quota of at least one new account a week, no matter how many calls it took. Listening to him, I realized that somehow I had gotten the whole process backward. To make my business viable, the first thing I needed was not a computer. It wasn't even an office or a desk. What I needed was a customer.

That call really galvanized me. Up until then, I'd never sold anything in my life, and selling is a scary thing -- particularly if you're a chief executive officer and your whole life's work is on the line. Imagine going out tomorrow and having to make cold calls on bars, trying to convince some guy who's never heard of your beer -- and handing him a bottle that isn't even labeled -- to carry it. The only thing standing between you and that customer's scorn is the integrity of your product. You're not talking to some demographic group. You're talking to an individual who is either going to buy your beer because he likes it or tell you to get lost.

And that frightened me. I was determined to follow my uncle's example and go for one account a week -- we needed only about 30 to get started -- but when the morning came to go out and do it, I didn't want to get out of bed. Finally I picked out a bar near my office at The Boston Consulting Group, where I was winding up my tenure as a management consultant. Wearing my usual dark pinstriped suit, I walked into the bar with six cold bottles of Samuel Adams beer in my briefcase and a lump in my throat.

There was a guy behind the bar whom I assumed was the bartender. As it turned out, not only was he merely the bar back (the guy who stacks glasses, keeps the shelves filled, and so on), but he didn't speak English. He looked at me as if I had two heads. While I stood there talking about my beer, the manager walked over and eyed me suspiciously -- he probably thought I was from the IRS or something. Anyway, I went through my story one more time and asked if I could pour him a glassful. He looked at my beer, sniffed it, drank it -- and immediately gave me an order for 25 cases. It was an amazing feeling. In the space of 10 minutes I went from sheer terror to ecstasy. My first thought as I walked out was, that's it for today -- I've got my one account!

When I got home that evening, the vision in my head was that it's really selling that drives most businesses: the direct interface between the product and customer, the crucial feedback loop. And if more CEOs had to go out and sell their products, day in and day out, they'd pay a lot more attention to what they were making. The more unwilling they are to put themselves in the middle of that transaction, the better chance they have of missing out on a critical element of their business. When you're out there selling, face-to-face with your customer, there's no place to hide. It's the acid test.

Given where I was coming from, my initial aversion to selling was pretty predictable. For seven years, I'd been a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group, specializing in production. My clients were such companies as General Electric and International Paper -- companies with which I had long-term, project-based relationships in which selling either wasn't an issue for me, or was something I did my best to avoid. After all, who wanted to risk that kind of rejection on a regular basis?

Before that, I'd gone through Harvard College and both its law and business schools. There, anybody who became a salesperson was considered a failure. Most graduates head into professions -- law, medicine, business management -- whose status gives them a kind of shield: the ability to say to others, consciously or unconsciously, I'm better than you are. They certainly don't want to be on the other person's level and risk having their egos crushed. So not only did I not value selling as a profession, but I also came from a culture in which it was implicitly -- and explicitly -- devalued, particularly compared with marketing.

Nowhere was this attitude more obvious than at Harvard Business School. I took the one required marketing course. It treated selling as some sort of given: that there's this "sales force" out there whose job it is to sell the product, period. The assumption was that the sales force pushes the product from the warehouse to the customer in the same way, say, that truckers take it from the factory to the warehouse. There must have been a dozen courses on marketing, and not a single one on selling. To me, that's appalling -- and it should be any businessperson.

Selling is a devalued skill. It's considered beneath anyone with an M.B.A.'s training. Marketing, on the other hand, is somehow "clean," something professional businesspeople aspire to. If you go to a cocktail party and you're asked what you do for a living, and you reply, "I'm a salesman," people look at you like you've got crumbs on your shirt. Tell them you're a marketing director, however, and they say, "How interesting." One has become a high-status occupation and the other something most people don't want to get their hands dirty doing.

In my view, this is one of the worst hoaxes ever pulled on American business. Manufacturers perceive marketing as a magic solution that takes away their responsibility for making good products. Their idea is, we'll make a product that's just as good as anything else out there -- not better, mind you, but just as good -- and marketing it well will make us rich. And that's a lot of crap.

I think just the opposite is true. Marketing is all about creating, in the consumer's mind, a value that does not exist: a way of differentiating a basically undifferentiated product and charging the consumer more money for it. Selling is fundamental. It is impossible to go out and sell a product you don't believe in, particularly if, as CEO, you're directly responsible for the quality of the product. Again and again, American business breaks that direct-feedback loop by divorcing responsibility for making the product from the responsibility for selling it.

And that has dire consequences. We're all consumers. We don't buy products because they happen to be better marketed. We look for better-made products. And if we -- you and I -- feel that way as consumers, why do we seem to believe that there's some undefined mass that wants to buy better-marketed products?

 1 | 2  NEXT