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Why Are We So Afraid Of Calling Sales - ‘Sales’ ?
salesHave you ever thought about how caught up we get in titles and departments and naming things. For example, someone once described their role to me as follows …
“Actually I am in Sales. Specifically Inside Sales. Well really - when I say Inside Sales - I am a Senior Outbound Telesales Executive, with responsibility for the digital acquisition of Western Region Customers.”
Say What ?
I was reminded of this today when I heard a discussion around the need to rename Inside Sales. Apparently ‘we need to rename inside sales to remove the stigma and old thinking around that term.’ Terms raised included Virtual Sales, Digital Sales and Social Sales.
How about just calling calling it Sales ?
Here’s my take
The differences between venerable institutions such as ‘sales’ and ‘marketing’ are hardly understood - much less “Virtual Sales, Digital Sales, Social Sales”. The world is all about the customer - not how we organize. How we do that (the orgs, the teams, the people, the hierarchy is meaningless to anybody outside a company - they don’t care - and nor should they)
I firmly believe that
- introducing more new terms is self defeating
- forever subdividing internal orgs with meaningless terms is self defeating
- continuing made up separation of organizations is self defeating
- continuing to use terms that border on the ‘pejorative’ is self defeating
- focussing on the organization - not the customer - is self defeating
What do you believe ?