Action Research for Professional Selling

Peter McDonnell, Jean McNiff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317185734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Vendite
• Index: Business

Action Research for Professional Selling by Peter McDonnell and Jean McNiff is for people working, or hoping to work in sales, who wish to improve their capacity for selling, and who may be involved in providing or participating in a structured sales training programme. It provides a basis for professional selling that connects the sales process to different philosophical models for understanding human interactions and contains much practical advice for selling in a tough economic environment. Action research is used across the professions as a powerful methodology for improving performance and outcomes and will enable sales practitioners to generate their practical theories of selling. The book answers calls for evidence-based practice in sales education, placing special emphasis on the strength of a values-based approach over the outmoded manipulative models of the past (many of which are still in evidence). It is essential to develop your understanding of what you are doing, and be able to explain it, and the book shows you how to do this through researching your practice in action. It focuses seriously on selling as a field of research offering an innovative, practical approach to selling, underpinned by strong theoretical and philosophical frameworks.

PART I
Sales and Action Research

Most salespeople want to find ways of increasing sales. This means studying and evaluating what you are doing, identifying those aspects that are working well, and taking action to improve any that need attention.

For many salespeople, selling is not simply about making money. It is also about promoting a product they are committed to, possibly that they have designed or produced. Selling their product gives meaning to a salesperson’s life: they contribute to other people’s wellbeing, and thereby to their own. All parties potentially benefit, learn and grow through the interaction.

Increasing sales and contributing to mutual wellbeing means checking what you know and need to know, and possibly need to improve about both sales and your practice. These issues are the focus of Part I, which consists of three chapters.

Chapter 1 is about sales. It outlines some common understandings of what sales is and some debates in the field. It helps you take stock of what you know and what you need to know, and where you locate yourself in the debates.

Chapter 2 is about action research. It outlines common understandings of what action research is, and some of the debates in the field. It explains how to research your practice in order to increase your sales and give deeper meaning to your life. It also helps you appreciate how you are contributing to knowledge of the field of sales.

Chapter 3 is about why you should do action research. It explains how doing something well involves studying and evaluating practice, which is core to extended professionalism. Continuing professional development becomes a normal part of practice. By saying that your practice is research-based, you contribute to your own professionalisation and to the professionalisation of sales.

Chapter 1
What is Sales? Becoming a Reflective Salesperson

This chapter deals with the critical issues raised in the Introduction, as follows:

• The changing nature of sales and the need for a new focus that shows the collaborative nature of relationships between salespeople, customers and business colleagues. This is contrary to many current sales practices that still position customers as competitors rather than as partners. Practitioners’ knowledge can contribute to this new focus.

• The need for sales to be seen as a credible area for study, and for research to be conducted by salespeople themselves, as well as by business leaders and academics in higher education. Salespeople’s experiential knowledge should be seen as the grounds for valid theories, and their practices as a form of theorising in action.

• The need for critique. The fact that salespeople’s knowledge is not highly valued stems mainly from a lack of critique about what counts as legitimate sales research and theory, who is qualified to do research, and how theory and practice may be linked. This situation needs interrogating.

Engaging with these issues has implications for you as a salesperson. If you wish to have your knowledge and yourself valued, you need to make sure you are up to date with current thinking in the field. You also need to develop the capacity for critique so you can show that you do not simply take things for granted but engage critically. You need to turn yourself into a discerning reflective practitioner and theorist.

The chapter contains advice about what you need to know in order to do this:

• What you need to know about sales.

• What you need to know about the methodologies of selling.

• What you need to know about researching sales.

What You Need to Know about Sales

As noted in the Introduction, higher education institutions do not often take sales seriously as a topic of study or include it on their curricula. To study sales in higher education you would need to register for, say, an MBA or similar, where you would study topics such as the theory of business, marketing, economics and strategic management. The expectation would be that you would apply the theory to your practice. Currently research into sales usually appears as part of sales management research (Guenzi and Geiger 2011). This involves learning how to manage a sales workforce, delegate responsibility and forecast trends.

This model of applying theory to practice has until recently been dominant across all disciplines, including teaching, nursing and healthcare, the military and police, and other public services. However, in recent decades it has come in for severe critique on the grounds that it still keeps theory and practice apart as separate realms of study and separate fields of discourse, so there is little connect between abstract theory and real-life social wellbeing. It is also recognised that linking theory and practice means including the voices of practitioners themselves, otherwise it becomes an artificial exercise, like reading about yoga but not doing it. Now, therefore, most higher education institutions have begun to incorporate practice-based forms of research onto their curricula, many in the form of action research (see below). However, this is still not happening to any great extent in business or sales, although awareness is growing in some places. You can contribute to changing this situation, and turn sales into a serious topic of study, but this means first appreciating what is involved. A key element is learning to become critical (Carr and Kemmis 1986). Critique does not mean finding fault with something, but interrogating what is going on in order to understand it better and improve it. It also means critiquing our own situatedness: we interrogate what is going on for us as well as around us. Primarily it means checking whether we are thinking what we have been taught to think, or are questioning and thinking for ourselves.

Here, then, we

• consider what we need to know about the nature of sales;

• think critically about how current practices and understandings have been influenced by historical, social and cultural developments;

• consider some implications for how the purposes of sales may be understood.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT SALES? WHAT ARE OUR CURRENT PERCEPTIONS?

Sales is generally understood as the interactive process between a salesperson (you) and a potential customer, which leads the customer to make the decision to buy the product. The outcome is that both lives may be enhanced. The customer gets the product they want (a new helicopter, a course that helps them improve their skills), as well as the joy and personal enhancement the experience of buying can bring (Appadurai 1988; Baudrillard 2005), and you and your company continue to thrive.

As a salesperson you are in a dual position spanning your customer’s and your company’s interests. You are able to influence the quality of your customers’ lives, as well as your own, through providing them with a service or product they want. You are also able to influence what happens in your product company. Behind the shop windows on the high street are the thousands of people who actually make up the company. You are the main communication channel, the interface between them and their customers. You are the only person in the entire system with a working knowledge of the product and the customer’s needs. This means you have considerable responsibility, opportunity and power for influencing the success of your company, as well as your own. In the 1970s and 1980s television comedy Open All Hours, the shopkeeper Arkwright would go out of his shop at the end of each day and look back at the front window, to take stock of what it would look like from a customer’s point of view and see what he needed to do to enhance their experience. You do this too. You reflect the customer’s perspective back to the company. This is central to ensuring the quality of a good customer experience as the basis of a successful sale. Watkinson (2013) comments:

… if you focus on delighting your customers … profit becomes a well earned by-product of a business that is successful in a much broader sense. You get the pleasure of knowing that you are making a positive contribution to people’s lives, and customers [will] reward you with their loyalty and do your marketing for you (Watkinson 2013: 5).

HOW HAVE WE COME TO KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT SALES?

Social movements do not just happen, but are subject to all kinds of influences. Current perceptions of what sales is and what it is for have been greatly influenced by historical, social and cultural developments. Here are some of the most important aspects.

Historical influences

It is widely accepted that sales should be seen as a fundamental aspect of human endeavour. Perhaps all economic evolution is premised on the fact that someone somewhere (an individual person or a government) sold an idea or a product (a toothbrush or a means of communication) to someone (a customer), who then bought or bought into the product or the idea. This may also be seen as the basis of social marketing (for example, Lee and Kotler 2011), the idea that marketing principles may be used for social and environmental benefit. Appadurai (1988) explains how, although commodities may be seen as objects of economic value, they also become symbolic of personal and social value. Bourdieu (1992) develops these ideas in discussions of symbolic power: if you have something other people desire they see you as having social capital and this gives you symbolic power, usually over them. In many contexts people don’t buy unless something is sold; and, because a lot of selling is done subtly, people often don’t realise they have been sold to. This is the basis of the concept of product placement: in the James Bond films, for example, branded articles such as champagne and cars are placed prominently.

Throughout the history of direct selling the principles of the sales process have remained constant, although the objects of exchange and forms of currency may have changed (in most places money has replaced physical goods, and credit cards have replaced cash). These principles are evident in the earliest records, including those of the Phoenicians or Indo-Romans who travelled the silk and incense trade routes and the merchants who travelled extensively to sell their goods. There was also a long tradition of ‘the peddler’ who both made and sold their wares direct to customers, often at street markets as well as through door-to-door selling. The traditions remain today, especially in the more indigenous forms of trade found in traditional Traveller communities in Ireland and in North African souqs and bazaars. Over time indigenous goods have been supplemented by new ones: Raleigh for example is reputed to have brought tobacco to the UK from the Americas. Nor was it always necessary to move far away from home to conduct one’s business. For example, prostitution, probably the most ancient profession, used the principles of pre-call planning and preparation, prospecting, presenting selling points and closing the sale (Gilfoyle 1994). Evidence remains in the preserved city of Pompeii in the form of paintings on the walls of a brothel, noted for its frequently long queues of tourists.

Trade also contributed to the development of empires and colonies through the activities of merchant adventurers visiting other countries to look for articles to trade. A striking example is the story of how Hong Kong was taken from China by the British in 1842 as a punishment for China’s temerity in opposing Britain’s selling opium into China, turning many people into addicts (Hoe and Roebuck 1999).

The Industrial Revolution

In the eighteenth century the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe began to influence the nature and purposes of selling. Now goods were mass-produced through the development of sophisticated machines, and concurrent economic expansionism enabled customers to acquire goods that were not essential to basic living. As manufacturing developed, manufacturers moved further and further away from customers by hiring representatives to market and sell their products for them. Selling became more remote and compartmentalised, which led perhaps inevitably to a separation of activities such as designing, managing, marketing and selling into different categories according to a factory model of production.

A great leap forward in the development of sales in the 1870s came in the form of Richard W. Sears, a railway employee in the US, who developed the idea of the sales catalogue which could be distributed by rail; this brought about an explosion of sales among a far-flung populace by creating a desire and the practical means of realising it. Prairie farmers in Kansas were able to order goods including pianos and even houses from the catalogue of the company that later became Sears Roebuck.

The rise of Fordism and Taylorism

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries two related trends became prominent: Fordism and the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Henry Ford initiated standardised piecework, where people worked on an assembly line using specialised tools for a particular job. These practices were strengthened by Taylor’s theory of scientific management, which aimed to improve efficiency and productivity through the organisation of work as units that could be measured in minutes and seconds. These practices have had long-lasting influence, giving rise to a culture of efficiency and rationality, premised on assumptions that the methods of scientific management may be transferred to all practices. In Chapter 2 we discuss ideas about the kind of knowledge and thinking that underpin these practices, especially in relation to how technical rationality has until recently been the dominant philosophy of business, management and commerce.

This philosophy of technical rationality can be seen everywhere. It has led to the mass marketisation of knowledge as a product to be sold, exported and imported (see Callahan’s 1964 classic The Cult of Efficiency for how these views have influenced education; Ball 2007, 2012 gives contemporary analyses). It is also visible in the prolific advertising of professional education courses, especially those that promise to turn practitioners into experts in ten easy steps. This view is contrary to that of the craftsperson (Sennett 2008), who spends long years of training and journeying to learn the core knowledge and skills of their craft. While philosophers such as Marcuse (1964) pointed out the potential dangers in practices that separated people from the goods they created, the practices continue today. An over-emphasis on scientific management ignores the idea that people can give meaning to their lives through their relationships with one another. It also ignores the potential technologisation of human endeavour, especially when consumerism becomes a means of social control (Aldridge 2003) and the resultant dangers of alienation where people feel separate from others and their own practices.

Alienation has indeed become a common experience of social living today and has significant implications for how salespeople understand their practices. Do they see their products simply as objects to be sold, rather than the realisation of their own beliefs and social commitments? In Miller’s (1994) Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman becomes disenchanted with life and work because it has little meaning for him. How do salespersons see customers? As sources of income rather than as people in themselves, means rather than ends? Scientific management legitimated a brash style and aggressive form of selling: while some people saw its usefulness in producing quick results and fast money without the expense of ethical considerations, by the 1970s and 1980s it was generally being recognised that a short-term ‘get-rich-quick’ philosophy was damaging to personal and organisational integrity. A need began to be expressed for new approaches to sales.

Social and cultural influences

People are more aware now of what they wish to buy because of the influence of social and cultural changes, as follows.

The education of consumers through the information revolution

The age of the Industrial Revolution has transformed into the information age through virtually universal access to computers and the Internet, so consumers are awar...