The Expeditionary Sales Force

A sales force is the people who form part of the division of a company that is responsible for selling the products or services that their company provide. The sales force is imperative to any company’s success, as they are often the “first impression” people get of a business. Most people form their perception of a company based on their interaction with the sales force. A sales force is pro-active in the sense that they take their business to the clients and they embody the company’s values. It is therefore salient for any business to appoint the right type of salespeople. There are six elements to the entrepreneurial sales organisation and, if implemented right they prove to be extremely valuable to a company. However, they are valuable at different stages in a company’s life cycle. Implement them at the wrong time and you’re almost certainly going to part ways or radically undershoot your potential. The six elements are; the creative sales force, the expeditionary sales force, the empowered sales force, the strategic sales force and the technological sales force. In this article I will be discussing certain characteristics of the expeditionary sales force.

Typical characteristics of an expeditionary sales force

The expeditionary sales force absolutely thrives in difficult and often uncomfortable situations. They consist over the ability to generate meaningful innovations and gain their adoption by senior management, functions within the firm and customers. The expeditionary sales force is the so called “go-getters”. They make things happen, they are always “rough and ready”, even though this can sometimes be to the company’s disadvantage. They are excellent in selling incomplete products, those products that are not yet completely refined to suit the market. The reason for this is because they have the utmost belief in the products they sell. This sales force actually make people want to buy their products and not just make them feel as if they are being sold to. They also delight in making contact with nearly anyone who they think might have the slightest need for what their company sells.

A good expeditionary sales force don’t just report back to their engineering team telling them the customer wants X, please build. Instead they use their discretion and knowledge about what they as a company already provide to link to what the customer is trying to achieve, not what they are necessarily asking for. They also have a “God-given” talent to negotiate prices on the fly if necessary. Arguably the most valuable asset of the expeditionary sales force is that they have a wonderful ability to get customers to open their wallets and spend. The expeditionary sales force challenge the status quo and have great resistance to traditional sales quotas and targets. They dislike formal procedures as they say they feel suppressed by them.

People buy people first and then the product. Hence it is important that any company’s sales force focus on building healthy relationships with their customers. The expeditionary sales force with all its good qualities, or any type of sales force for that matter will most definitely not be successful if they don’t succeed in building strong relationships with their customers.