Harish Bijoor

A country gets the salespersons that suit its temperament.

MEET the salespersons of a country, and you understand the country! Selling is a sub-culture all its own. Selling and the many nuances of it that salespersons practise in different cultures is a giveaway of its people. Study a sample of 20 salespersons in a country, and you understand the country, its people, its practices, its ethics and much else, for sure!

A nation gets the type of salesperson it deserves. Selling is a completely people-centric process in more ways than one. The machines that sell are yet to hit our markets in a meaningful manner. As selling is all about people-to-people interaction, selling as a skill and a science evolves in sync with the people of a society and their particular state of evolution in the cycle of commerce. An advanced nation therefore gets an advanced kind of a salesperson with a rather advanced scale of spiel as well. A developing nation, on the other hand, gets a salesperson who is himself in a state of development. And an under-developed nation is comfortable with the basic kind of a salesperson who pegs his skill to the elementary nature of that evolving society. Multinational corporations of every kind have faced the trickiest of situations in their transfer policies applied to salespersons with skill sets honed to sales sub-cultures that are different. Many have learnt the hard way. Selling is culture-centric. Transferring a salesperson across boundaries is, therefore, a sensitive process to address in itself. I believe a salesperson of insurance, transplanted from the mother of them all insurance hardsell markets, the US, to a developing market like India is a disaster of a move more often than not! The insurance salesperson in the US is a sixth-generation evolution that focuses on the wants of a hardened insurance buyer. The approach that bullies and burns into a sale is different, as compared to a culture of cajoling that still prevails in a market like India!

Walk into the radius of a salesperson in the US, and the culture of the market is clear to understand. Words that will jump out into your face will be words such as `loud', `direct', `hard', `candid', `in-the-face', `scare-oriented', `insecurity buzz' and lots more. All this for the insurance sector alone!

Compare this to the Indian market then. Words that hit you are as supple and simple as `investment', `security', `money-back', `safety', `family care', and words of a softer tone than all these as well! Do this across 13 different categories of products and services in a country, and you have a profile of the people of the country. More often than not, there is not too much complication across categories as well. What applies to one is pretty common across the rest.

Selling is therefore a sub-culture. A sub-culture that depends on the semantic, the tone, tenor and word, different for every region in question. Try supplanting the approach of one sub-culture with another, and do it at your own risk! This sub-culture is not static. Just as the people of a country change and evolve in their purpose of commercial living, the sub-culture of selling itself changes as well.

Look keenly at the India of our making. In the early days of our Independence, during the late Forties and all of the Fifties, the nation had a set of salespersons which emoted with the dominant mood of the nation and its people in a very dignified manner. The salesperson at large was one who literally breathed the language of the day, which was all about two big images fed to the nation: Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. This was a hard-working era. The salesperson had to speak the language of the day. He did it with panache.

All selling was done on the savings orientation. The tone and tenor of talk had to be hard work and good honest effort. It was all about toil, sweat, hard-earned money being spent in the careful manner of spending. The salesperson was the catalyst for this spend in many ways, but he was a catalyst sensitive to the mood of the moment. Years passed. The Sixties and the Seventies saw a slightly different salesperson. This was the day and age of supply actually meeting demand. There was, however, a stress on resources that was under a crunch. Oil itself was an issue. Cost saving was a mantra to bear. The future was something to take care of. The salesperson in many ways was making everything future-safe. Today was important, but he could not yet be hedonistic in his orientation. Not yet!

The Eighties and Nineties eased up a bit. Indian society had a bit more to spend. Prosperity indices were just about inching up, at least in the realm of the great Indian middle class that grew from 125 million to 240 million in these years! The salesperson was easing up. Durables and consumer electronics were being sold with the language of hype. Even now, the salesperson of insurance was still talking a language that was conservative. The travel salesperson struggled on with the language of "learning experiences" and "exposure to cultures." Fun was still not in the language of the salesperson.

The years of the 2000 series attract a different language, tone and tenor of talk. The words will focus more on today and less on yesterday and tomorrow. It will be all about the power of today and its consumption. Today is the reality. Yesterday is history and tomorrow is not something one can plan for.

The salesperson of the day does not hesitate to use the language of fun. The language of overt consumption is fine. The salesperson will talk of personal experiences that are self-fulfilling that much more. Hedonistic pleasure is not yet in, but it will be. Soon! The salesperson, therefore, is an evolving entity, which morphs ever so slowly with the culture at large. The salesperson at the cutting edge of the market learns this at his own pace. Those far away from it in organisation, sitting higher up in the hierarchy, and therefore far away from the consumer, understand it less and less. Learn then from the front-end salesperson of yours, the all-new language of selling. The all-new culture that is at play in the marketplace. This is one thing you can't teach him. This is something that he alone can teach you sitting higher up in the corporate hierarchy of selling! Excitingly so, nothing is static!

(The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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