Innovators, Sell Your Way to Success!

Introduction

Sales, sales leadership, and the selling process are misunderstood by most venture-backed entrepreneurs. While innovators often do a good job pitching an idea to investors, a decent job on market analysis, and a mediocre job on marketing, they often do a poor job on sales and the selling process for their company. This insufficient focus on revenue production, and leaders’ limited skill and experience in that area, has sunk many a promising company.

Thus, I am republishing this foreword I wrote in 2012 for my friend and colleague’s book, The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich. I hope the foreword inspires some innovators not only to read the book but more importantly to establish a focus on and skill in selling, especially in these difficult venture-financing times (when revenue generation is a key need).

Foreword to The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich

When Anthony Belli first approached me to write this foreword, I was a bit perplexed. I wondered if and how this author could successfully translate his life experiences into being both the foundation and the basis for his very successful career in sales and sales management. Further, I asked myself if he could effectively correlate those life experiences into successful sales techniques: ones that, if memorialized and employed by other sales executives, could be a tool kit to help them achieve their own success. Having myself grown up in an ethnic, blue-collar Boston community in a family of modest means, Anthony’s work and the legitimacy of a “Street-Smart” way of doing things intrigued me.

It is important to note that as a former CEO, I have always admired and respected my salesforce. While many team members contributed, I believe my sales teams were the root cause of my success. They were in the trenches; they were on the front lines. They were facing customers on a daily basis; they were the first line representation of the company to its customer base. Anthony was one of those team members, and his contributions were legendary.

While I enjoyed giving the sales team the opportunity to grow and develop professionally and financially, I retained what I think is a fair trade-off: more equity. As with many professional sales teams, mine were personable, fun loving, and attractive high performers, capable of hard work and outstanding results. Anthony Belli was a very successful and very well compensated member/leader of that and other great sales teams. As you will see, he attributes a great deal of his success to his upbringing, his environment, and the skills, including survival skills, that evolved from that environment.

It is important for the reader to note that the salesforce, as a unit, can and usually does provide the foundation upon which a successful company can be built, and its shareholder value enhanced. Despite the often-used phrase (and I have heard it from members of several boards of directors) “a great product sells itself,” it is an entirely incorrect assumption. Even the best, most innovative products do not sell themselves. I base this statement on countless experiences attempting to introduce innovative new products, whose benefits would seemingly be obvious to any casual observer and especially to a potential customer. One more time: None of these products sold themselves. While great products may make the sales process easier, all products require the competent and relentless execution of a sales plan borne of a sound sales strategy that is in alignment with the company’s own corporate goals and strategy. And, in order to execute against these plans, there is need for a professional sales team.

Going beyond that top-down approach, the up-to-date “hunter/killer” sales professional or the street-smart salesperson sets and executes what he or she believes is the most productive individual strategy for penetrating and growing the company’s business within the respective sales territory. Anthony argues that the traditional approaches to effective selling are, in many ways, counter to those he advocates and teaches. He says the traditional approaches to selling stressing features, benefits, and price can be least effective in not only setting yourself apart from your peers, but also least effective in getting a customer to agree to do business with you and your company. Anthony’s approach, honed on the mean streets of East Harlem in the 1960s, involves the successful use of the very traits that allowed him not only to survive what was a high-risk childhood, but to grow and mature into a highly successful, beautifully attired, and extremely effective sales professional. The lessons Anthony learned growing up were instrumental in his building a successful career in business that has now spanned more than 30 years. The lessons he teaches can, in many instances, be applied to any profession, whether in sales or not.

In preparing this Foreword, I asked the question, “Why is this work important?” Well, based on my own experience leading a number of successful enterprises, successfully employing a motivated and professional salesforce is the very basis for top line growth and ultimately for company success. It is well documented that shareholder value is driven more by revenue growth than by profit growth. And yet, given the extraordinary impact and power over the enterprise’s success that a successful sales organization can have, many employers do not treat their sales team with the respect and recognition that they deserve. Witness a large healthcare company, where a salesperson pays her dues with two years in the field, often followed by a staff assignment and career path outside of sales. Or better yet, witness a successful salesperson having her territory cut as her production-based compensation was higher than senior executives at the company. Further, few of our best and brightest management school graduates are encouraged to seek out and aspire to positions in sales and sales management. Very little or no attention is paid to the sales profession or sales as a key topic worthy of study at the nation’s top-tier business schools. In fact, if one were to peruse their course offerings, I would bet the number of classes offered with a focus on sales by each of the respective schools to be one or two at most. (*Note: Since I wrote this 2012 foreword, I believe the percentage of company execs with a sales background has grown.)

And so, you begin this journey by joining Anthony as he traces his childhood and his experiences from the footsteps of Holy Rosary Elementary School in East Harlem to a career of sales excellence and a very comfortable life. While on this long journey, Anthony observes and picks up tidbits of learning that, in the aggregate, form what he has identified as the street-smart salesperson, one who perseveres, listens, and learns from his customers. And one who creates in the customer’s mind a perceived value beyond product features, benefits, and price, while building a sustainable relationship that few other salespeople successfully accomplish. With Anthony, there were and are no excuses common to many salespeople — to wit, the product needs certain features to sell it, the company did not give me the support I needed, and other excuses — a culture lacking accountability. Remembering my own background on the not-so-gentle streets of Boston, I found many of his “street-smart” teachings may be categorized or identified in another way — as good old common sense and as an unparalleled sense of accountability.

-Joe Mandato, DBA, Fellow, The Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University

The Street-Smart Salesman — Copyright © 2012 by Anthony Belli. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.