Fast Talk: Tough Sell

Beth Klein

President and CEO
GE Medical Systems, Americas
Waukesha, Wisconsin
Nothing happens in business unless and until someone sells something. I learned how to sell at the Steak and Ale Restaurant, in South Bend, Indiana. Working my way through college as a waitress, I became really good at adapting my style to the different personalities of my customers.

The best salespeople see things through their customers' eyes, modify their styles to their customers' chemistry, and pull together their offering to meet their customers' needs. Ten years ago, our customers were focused on technology. Today, technology performance has to be translated into improving patient outcomes, enhancing quality, and reducing costs. It's a more subtle conversation. So the biggest challenge for salespeople is to get quality time in front of their customers.

But being in front of the customer doesn't help if you do all the talking. My father used to say, "Many a sale was lost from the jawbone of an ass." What Dad said then applies today.

Beth Klein (beth.e.klein@med.ge.com) began her 20-plus-year career with GE Medical Systems in sales. She now oversees a sales team of some 1,500 people throughout the Americas and is responsible for more than $3 billion in revenue.

Fred Bialek

Cofounder
National Semiconductor Corp.
Woodside, California
I'm not going to excuse the snake oil that's been sold over the past few years, or the business scandals. But these times of distrust haven't changed things. People who have a knack for selling have always had it. The essence of selling is understanding your customer's needs and convincing him that you're the best one to meet them.

In today's semiconductor business, there's tremendous pressure to sell on price. But the best way to sell is to sell on value. That's harder, because it takes brains. But that's the only way to prosper. Back in the 1970s, when I ran National Semiconductor's point-of-sale division, our "value sell" was a missionary sell. We had to convince the big supermarket chains that they needed our checkout-scanning systems. The only way to do that was to understand their business. I knew the industry so well that presidents of the supermarket chains used to ask me for business advice. We were fundamentally changing the way that these supermarkets operated.

Now, when you combine brains with tenacity, you've really got something. My toughest sale was in the point-of-sale business. We were trying to sell scanners to a supermarket chain in Detroit. When I heard that the store was planning to go with NCR instead, I called up the vice president in charge and said, "Jack, what the hell are you doing here? You know we're the better choice." It was a done deal, he told me, and besides, he was taking off for Europe the next afternoon. I took a red-eye to Detroit to meet him for breakfast. I listened to his concerns and the issues that were raised by his guys, refuted their points, listened some more, and turned them around. We made the sale.

Fred Bialek has been called the "toughest SOB who ever sold." He was one of five people who left Fairchild Semiconductor in 1967 to relaunch National Semiconductor Corp. Today, Bialek is a private consultant.

Omid Kordestani

Senior vice president, world sales and field operations
Google
Mountain View, California
Selling is like martial arts: To do it well, you have to apply the right amount of energy in the right spots, adding skill and precision over time. When Google was founded in 1998, people wondered whether the world needed another search engine. We focused on demonstrating and delivering value to our customers and users. Since then, the boom times went bust. There's no longer room for mistakes or for people who never knew how to sell in the first place.

So we continue to pick our salespeople carefully. We have a rigorous hiring process. We also pick our customers carefully. Before we can even begin the sales process, we make sure that there's a fit between Google and the customer. If we don't believe that we can solve a customer's problem, then we walk away from the opportunity -- even if the customer is willing to do business with us. It's painful in the short term, but it's the right thing to do for long-term growth.

For example, two years ago, we turned down a multimillion-dollar relationship because our immediate product couldn't really solve this customer's problem. Our competition won the account. Since that time, we've broadened our product's capabilities, and the competition has failed to deliver on its initial promise. Now the customer is with us.

Omid Kordestani (omid.kordestani@google.com) leads a 90-person sales team at Google. He became the company's top sales executive in 1999 and played a critical role in bringing it to profitability. Prior to joining Google, Kordestani was vice president of business development and sales at Netscape Communications.