Forget Your Technology and Insurance Skills

Having solid selling and buying technology experience taught me one important thing: it is all about human skills. All surviving companies have extraordinary technologies supporting SOA, clouding, social media integrations, mobile etc, but some of them can sell better than others. Why? Sure it is also about the size (so trust level based on company’s happy (?) references) of the ICT Company which cannot be changed in short term and the price which is not an identical comparison component, but briefly a perception. Consequently the most important tool you have is your sales force. How can you improve it? I’m not a continuously smiling and “always self-confident” management consultant (God bless ), so please don’t call any soft or hard sales trainings and sales-force automation tools. What I am recommending: First think about tough life of an ordinary salesman: quota pressure, humiliating pre-sales and other technical guys, IT Managers (unattainable demigods), mandatory trainings. Then think about how the company can support the salesman’s human skills. I have a very easy answer, accept and support your salesman as a human. One of the recent researches* says that: Perceived Organizational Support (POS) increases trust and satisfaction of employees, and these two increase Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB) and decreases intention to leave the organization, and finally all increase the performance. By the way POS is the degree to which employees believe that their organization values, their contributions and cares about their well-being and fulfills employees' socio-emotional needs. It’s your turn. What can your company do to increase your POS? If nothing find another company .

* “Support, Trust, Satisfaction, Intent to Leave And Citizenship At Organizational Level: A Social Exchange Approach”, Pascal Paillé, Laurent Bourdeau, Isabelle Galois, International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Vol. 18, Iss: 1 pp. 41 – 58, 2010