When I was a sophomore in high school, I was our varsity baseball team’s bullpen catcher. I also started as our designated hitter most of the games, but one could always find me in the bullpen during games and practice. During one practice, our pitching coach, Don Soderstrum (Sodi), walked over to the bullpen with our starting center fielder, Tommy Butler. Tommy was a junior and had a canon hanging off of his right shoulder. He also had a competitive spirit and very strong legs (he was a starting cornerback for our football team). However, he never pitched. Sodi, with his deep New England accent, yelled to me “Peta, I want Butla to throw a few to ya.”
So, I crouched into my position and began an amazing two-season partnership. I don’t know if I had heard the term “diamond in the rough” yet in my young life, but I had a 190-lb. one standing 60 feet away from me … and boy was he rough. Tommy threw the ball with all four seams like every non-pitching fielder; he didn’t know how to throw off-speed pitches; and he didn’t have the best control. But wow. He had a natural wind-up motion that utilized his lower body, and the pop of my catcher’s mitt drew everyone’s attention – my memory, although probably more dramatic than reality, has the rest of the team stopping practice to see what was happening near the left field foul pole.
Tommy never pitched in a game that year. He continued to be our starting center fielder, and he’d spend his time in the bullpen during practice with the other pitchers. He learned how to pitch that season. The next year, his senior season, he was our ace starting pitcher. That was my junior year and I was now our starting catcher. I loved catching for the guy – he was overpowering, out of control many times (with his pitching and his temperament), listened to me more than the coaches, and he always found a way to win. He made the Cape Coast All-Conference Team as a pitcher and earned a baseball scholarship to play for one of the best JUCO baseball programs in the country.
What’s this got to do with your sales staffing efforts? Most system integrators, technology providers, and manufacturers are challenged in finding high-performing sales people. One of the primary mistakes sales leaders and executives make is looking for seasoned sales people with industry experience. Well, there is a limited amount of those industry veterans (and they’re usually not as good as one thinks they’ll be). Coach Soderstrum knew that our pool of pitchers for the next year was slim, so he had to find someone with raw talent and teach him to pitch. He found a center fielder that could squat 300 pounds for reps and throw a baseball as hard as 99.9% of humans. No pitching experiences? Nothing a little development (and a pretty smart catcher😊) can’t cure.
You’ve got an entire pool of candidates that are waiting for someone to hire them and teach them the world of complex sales. Generation Z – the young adults that have been graduating from college for the last three years or so - have more raw professional sales skills than any of us ever had. They’re curious, have a sense of urgency, want to make an impact, and want their supervisors to measure their work. Their potential is huge, but like Tommy … they’ll need someone to identify their talent and to develop them.
If you’re interested in learning more about Generation Z and their potential to becoming the greatest selling generation, click here to register for the SIA Webinar that I’ll be giving on Wednesday, November 7th, How to Develop Generation Z Sales People.
