The Middleman in the Sales Process

by J.B. Bernstein @JBBERNSTEIN

In part six of this series on Seven Figure selling I examine what I call the "Middle-Man" paradigm.

A Seven Figure salesperson, or any salesperson for that matter, really is a middle man.

It goes without saying that a salesman needs to represent the brand in a way that drives sales. To the outside world, they must be the foremost authority on the product(s) and the ultimate brand ambassador. 

What often goes overlooked is the role they must play internally. They are the barometer of market conditions. They need to make sure there is no disconnect between the internal product people's perception and what is actually driving or hampering sales in the real world.

This is why I say that the salesman must be a middleman in the process. Sometimes delivering real world feedback on the product back to the company is tougher than actually selling the product.

I think back to when I was working with the Downy brand. They had a 97% household penetration, and they had almost $3 Billion in wholesale sales. Even with that dominance we saw the beginnings of a chink in the armor. Alternate scents were making inroads in the category. Downy had an enormous performance advantage over its competitors, so they had started to believe that the advantage alone was good enough for them to maintain their stranglehold on the softener market. The brand was all about April Freshness, so the concept of making alternate scents was met with great resistance. You can imagine how hard it was to explain to the product designers that users were willing to sacrifice performance for scent. It sounds crazy but it was true. A significant group of users was willing to give up some softness for a sunshine fresh or mountain breeze scent.

It seems crazy. I mean the product is called "fabric softener", yet some people cared more about fragrance than softness. You can see how critical it was for the sales force to extract that info from the market and then to sell it internally and get more scents made.  

Today Downy has many scents, and still maintains its enormous market advantage over competitors.