Secret sauce of the greatest salespeople

April 5, 2011

Does the 21st century call for a different type of sales person?

What makes salespeople successful? Is there an archetypal sales person that can thrive in any situation, any industry and in any business cycle? Are all successful sales people actually aggressive, pushy and short-sighted like some of the stereotypical portrayal of sales people out there?

Inc.com just ran a very interesting article on the greatest 10 salespeople of all time. While I am not sure of the ranking criteria that leads them to select the 10 people, I do agree that the selected are worthy of any possible edition of the Sales Hall of Fame. Perhaps there might be other sales people who can generate more revenue or profits for themselves or their organizations or perhaps there might be other sales people who are better known, or well loved. But the ten people listed in the article also represent a nice historical story from the earliest days of organized sales forces in the early 20th century to the late 20th century’s hard driving, disciplined enterprise sales culture symbolized by Larry Ellison.

For each person in the list, I thought of a key winning characteristic or strategy they have come to embody in the annals of Salesmanship. The question that remains is – in the 21st century, with the rapidly growing Internet and social media companies that are immensely profitable like Groupon or Zynga, will there be new paradigms of sales excellence that have drastically different modus operandi from these luminaries? Looking at how much has changed in the last 100 years, I bet the list of greatest sales people in the 21st century will be very different.

1. John Patterson: His genius was in organizing his salesforce, and standardizing the sales cycle with scripts and milestones, which takes the guess work out of managing a growing sales team.

2. David Ogilvy is the ultimate paradigm of customer relationship development, knowing how to build a rapport with a stranger, and build upon it and bring sophistication to sales.

3. Mary Kay Ash showed that women could be great salespeople too, and really redefined the meaning of “incentives” in sales, imbuing in it cultural and social values.

4. Dale Carnegie was not the first to highlight the importance of good team dynamics, but certainly he was one of the most successful and influential believers of this principle. His book is a blue print for success in society, as well as in sales.

5. Joe Girad really drove home the importance of numbers in sales. Today, this is even more important as we have at our fingertips powerful sales analytics to help optimize the sales process and the organizational structure of a sales team, regardless of its size.

6. Erica Feidner is ultimately the most successful piano salesperson because she knows how to deliver a compelling value proposition to the customer, something that really touches the customer’s heart and soul.

7. Ron Popeil creates the blue print for the incredible success of the infomercial in the last 30 years. Furthermore, he shows that the advent of new technologies does not necessarily mean that warm, passion and exuberance cannot be transmitted through newer media like the TV.

8. Larry Ellison sets the standard for building a sales team that is aggressive and over achieving, yet incredibly loyal to him. Hate him or love him, you have to accept that he influenced countless generations of salespeople, and in the process, built one of the most lucrative technology businesses in the world.

9. Zig Ziglar should be credited with much of the popularization of the modern sales philosophy, with his tireless public speaking engagements, his numerous books on sales best practices and sales methodology.

10. Napoleon Barragan saw the enormous potential of ecommerce before everyone else. He was a salesperson that fully grasped the changing technology landscape and made full use of it, showing that technology will ultimately be a blessing for the sales person.

I shall repeat my question here – will the 21st century bring about new sales champions who will leverage the enormous reach of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, in ways that we have not thought of before?

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.