The most appropriate presentation technique for use with adaptive selling is the canned method

Canned Adaptiveness: A New Direction for Modern Salesmanship

For many years, the word "salesman" elicited thoughts of chicanery, sophistry, and high pressure. A well-known scholar of salesmanship wrote that "salespeople's primary motivation is an amalgam of greed and hostility with hostility directed principally toward their supervision and toward the public to whom they sell." [1] Arthur

Miller's play Death of a Salesman had previously reinforced the negative ideology of salesmanship, and even Merriam-Webster's Third New International Unabridged Dictionary defined "sell" with words like "cheat," "deceive," and "dupe."

Today, however, salesmanship is seen as a two-way problem-solving process. Salespeople uncover prospects' needs and in turn adapt the mix and presentation of their offerings to respond precisely to those needs. Clearly, the opportunity to customize each presentation differentiates personal selling from other promotional tools.

On the other hand, management's efforts to control the accuracy and ethics of the sales message have increased the use of highly structured or "canned" presentations. Sales presentations increasingly utilize video and audio cassettes, slides, transparencies, flip charts, printouts, and other forms of graphics. As well, elaborate and expensive props may imply company bigness, success, and quality and suggest that the firm's products have broad acceptance and consumption patterns.

Numerous salespeople, managers, trainees, and analysts are convinced that "canned" and "adaptive" sales presentations are polar opposites. And so they choose to be adaptive and condemn highly structured presentation modes as dysfunctional and therefore unacceptable. Is such a viewpoint strategically sound? Or should sales leaders be concerned about the emergence of a potentially dangerous form of "adaptive overkill"?"

The discussion that follows is by no means an attack on instinctiveness and adaptiveness in selling. But I do feel an urge to rethink, update, and perhaps even correct some misguided beliefs about the planning, format, and delivery of the seller's message.

IN SUPPRT OF

UNSTRUCTURED SELLING

"There's no such thing as a non-canned sales pitch."

"Salesmanship is often animated advertising."

"A sales presentation is not required to be human . . . only to be informative and persuasive."

"Few salespeople can originate a sales presentation from scratch. This is why every salesperson, even the skilled professional, employs, to some extent . . . a 'canned presentation.'"

The above quotes came from the mouths of four senior sales/marketing executives or scholars. When I flashed them on a screen at a workshop for senior sales executives, a host of detractors scrambled to make a case for the role of human intuition in selling as opposed to the artificiality or preprogramming of the canned sales presentation.

The ensuing debate was not unexpected, since studies have confirmed senior management's resistance to sales presentation forms dominated by automation or subject to substantial company input or control. Two primary arguments arise in opposition to dehumanizing salesmanship:

* The salesperson's needs are not satisfied;

* The prospective customer's needs are not satisfied.

The Salesperson's Needs

Many sales analysts and practitioners argue that as the presentation assumes more structure, the salesperson's role is downgraded--"any idiot can insert and play a...