The Portsmouth Herald - Teaching the science of sales

The Portsmouth Herald

By Michael McCord
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Dianne Durkin is one determined woman. You have to be determined and possess a touch of revolutionary zeal to transform the sales profession and come to the aid of salespeople who often don't know what they are selling or understand the needs of their customers.

"Too often, salespeople are completely ill-served by bad training and thrown to the wolves," said Durkin, president of Loyalty Factor, a Portsmouth-based consulting and training company. "There are some who are natural salesmen, but the majority are expected to get it on their own. It's a terrible way to do business. ... And if you've got sales personnel who don't know what they are doing, the company itself has an internal communication problem as well."

Founded in 1996 by Durkin, Loyalty Factor specializes in change management, customer-loyalty programs and training and leadership management programs to enhance overall employee, customer and brand loyalty.

Loyalty Factor's clients include Genuity, Abbott Laboratories, IBM/Lotus, Kronos and The Hartford.

Durkin, a native of Palmer, Mass., has also founded and sold two other companies, including a sheepskin hat business in Poland.

Communication is the key, but Durkin strives to go beyond the basic notions of listening and talking better. What she offers is a systematic approach based on "neuro-linguistics," theories that focus on taking cues from voice tone, vocabulary cues (speaking in visual, auditory, or kinesic terms) personality types (i.e., sensor, intuitor, feeler) and body language.

The macro-goal is to enhance a wide range of communication skills - listening, asking questions, and knowing oneself.

"You absolutely need to know who you are," Durkin said.

Without self-knowledge - which isn't the same as self-awareness - a sales person can't develop the necessary empathy or ability to read customers. One needs a certain amount of empathy before getting to the facts.

"Questions are the secret weapon of the sales professional, and if you listen to specific questions you ask, the client will tell you their buying criteria," she said.

In her quest to transform the sales profession - and the communication ills of entire companies - Durkin has created a program called Ask and You Shall Sell.

It's a variation on Loyalty Factor training models for the customer service industry, but her 25 years' experience in training and development, finance, direct sales and international marketing opened her eyes to the weaknesses in sales. She also held high corporate positions with General Electric, Gulf Oil, Digital Equipment Corp. and Corporate Branding Partnership.

In particular, Durkin cites her time as a corporate training manager for Digital Equipment as an education.

"At the time, the computer industry was booming and we were hiring as many as 200 people a week, and most of the sales staff didn't have the skills, didn't know our products or the industry," she said.

Durkin wasn't surprised when a dearth of adequate training led many to bail out, seeing themselves as sales failures.

One of Durkin's clients is Globalware Solutions, a multimillion dollar Haverhill, Mass., company with 250 employees, which specializes in hi-tech printing and fulfillment, covering everything from printing software boxes to developing customer service Web sites for companies like Avid and Nortel.

As with many of Durkin's clients, Globalware was in the midst of seismic changes - in its operations, management and market awareness, to name a few.

"Like many hi-tech companies, we've gone through a lot of changes. There was a lot of insecurity and a lack of teamwork. Both internally and externally, there were too many islands not communicating with each other," said Donald Jette, director of client services.

What Loyalty Factor did was bring order to chaos and it transcended, bolstering up the sales and customer service departments.

"Really, from the first class, we started immediately to open up the communications we have with our customers and internally," Jette explained. "The important thing from a sales point of view is how many intangibles we realized - getting people to understand themselves which helps them see the customers in a different way, to see how the customer, or their colleague, reacts."

Jette has been in business for more than three decades, and says Durkin's curriculum of classes and focused role-play training on real account problems has proven effective beyond his expectations.

Scores of Globalware employees from every department have taken part, and he says the changes have taken hold quickly, much faster than he imagined possible.

"I've taken Dale Carnegie classes and behavior modification training, but this is leading edge, probably one of the best I've ever seen, and we plan to use it on an ongoing basis," Jette said.

There were a lot of light-bulb moments when he said, "Yes, I knew that, but didn't know I could do it this way, and it kind of sucks you in."

Neil Parmenter, a professor of business and management at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, is part of a minority of academics who teaches sales at the college level.

One of the reasons why sales people are so educationally neglected, Parmenter says, is an "old school" belief "that sales can't be learned, but is a personality trait and all you had to do was schmooze and glad-hand people, but professional sales is a lot more than personality."

Parmenter has been a salesman and sales executive himself, and he points out there is a "strong cultural bias that salesmen are deceptive, slimy and have poor ethics," if any at all.

And corporate executives have been burnt time and again by self-professed gurus "who are charlatans making a lot of money by running sales seminars which treat sales like a voodoo topic."

Parmenter says major cultural and business changes are happening that require a well-educated sales force.

"We have more educated business and customer clients and they are more savvy and more attuned to the bottom line. They want success, not just a buddy ... if you can't listen and if you don't understand your customers and what you are selling inside and out, the old ways won't work."

Durkin is finding out that corporate executives in all sectors of the economy are realizing that outdated sales methods not only don't work, but can cripple a company from top to bottom.

Durkin declines to reveal what Loyalty Factor revenues are, but says annual growth is about 20 percent.

Loyalty Factor trainers - there are 10 full-time employees and consultants - are often out on the road from California to Florida, conducting seminars that range from $5,000 to $100,000, depending on a detailed summary of client needs and number of participants.

And Durkin envisions opening up branch offices in Atlanta, Ga., Jacksonville, Fla., and California. "People buy from people. I know from my own experiences that people can learn to be effective salesmen. It's not magic," Durkin said. "A lot of what we do is based on bringing things to the conscious minds in our relationships and helps to build rapport. Rapport leads to respect. Respect leads to disclosure. Disclosure leads to commitment and commitment leads to partnership."