Martha Luz González
Former National VP of Channels at Tecnoquímicas
The interview with Martha Luz is brimming with insights and advice for our entire community. From the outset, she shared one of her greatest learnings from her extensive sales career, emphasizing that a salesperson, more than just selling a product or service, sells and offers the consumer’s needs manifested in products. In her case, during her time at TQ, she sold well-being and health represented by certain pharmaceutical and personal care products. The lesson here is not to limit ourselves as salespeople and think that we’re only selling something simple. Our contribution to the consumer goes far beyond a service or a product. Martha says that the perfect recipe for a salesperson is the mix of innate personality with training.
Martha’s career began in marketing. From this experience, she shared her first two significant learnings in the sales process. The first is to always conduct market research before launching an initiative. Launching a product without market research greatly increases the chance of making mistakes. The most crucial part here is listening to potential consumers to identify who fits the proposal and how it aligns with them. This step doesn’t always start from scratch; many times, there’s a solid foundation to predefine things, making research useful for validating assumptions. It’s essential to remember that consumers are VERY dynamic. The second step is to group or segment potential clients. When market research goes well, the results themselves reveal these groups.
What did we Discuss with Martha?
The next topic of conversation with Martha revolved around the skills she believes a person on a sales team should possess. Her response was divided into two parts, as she sees two types of profiles within this role.
The first profile is the strategic one. They’re responsible for designing the value proposition and crafting the strategy for sales. The second profile is the implementers. They execute the strategy designed by the first group. The characteristics of people in each group are quite distinct. Martha suggests that in any company, these two roles should always be differentiated in a sales team. While this differentiation is often easier in larger companies than in smaller ones, Martha Luz advises that even if it’s just two people, these roles should be distinct.
We wanted to delve a bit more into the characteristics of the second group: the implementers. According to Martha, these individuals possess personality traits that make them good salespeople, including empathy, an innate ability and willingness to serve and offer something, the capacity to relate, listen, and communicate, problem-solving skills, optimism, enthusiasm, and mental flexibility to adapt to situations. However, this innate selling ability must be nurtured through training—training about the product, the company and its offerings, training about the consumer, and in objection-handling and negotiation techniques.
“A salesperson is a mixture of nature and nurture. You need to amplify all the personality traits that people are born with to sell. But it’s crucial to have the humility to say, ‘I have qualities of a good salesperson, but I need training.’ The potential and success of someone with this blend are incredibly high.”
Martha Luz González
How to Convey that Knowledge and Necessary Training?
For Martha, consistency and persistence in taking courses are most important. She suggests having group coaches within the same organization, usually the sales supervisors. These coaches design courses and continuously evaluate individuals on techniques and products. This approach works well in smaller organizations. However, TQ quickly realized that this format wouldn’t work because these individuals didn’t have the time to be mentors due to their heavy workload. Therefore, they established a structure where they selected mentors dedicated solely to transmitting knowledge with a high capacity to educate.
Finally, we concluded this interview with our signature question: Are salespeople born or made? For Martha Luz, it’s a combination. According to her, you need to amplify all the innate personality traits people are born with to sell—such as at the very least, being born with a desire to serve, offer, and relate. But Martha states that these individuals must harness that same emotional intelligence they’re born with to sell and have the capacity and humility to say, “I have qualities of a good salesperson, but I need training.” For Martha, this is the perfect recipe for a star salesperson: innate personality + training. The potential and success of someone with this blend are incredibly high.
