Leader: Slovenly Salesforces Need a Dressing Down

I met a friend of mine this week. Something about him struck me as unusual. I soon realised what it was. He was not in his usual regulation corporate dark suit and white shirt. He resembled a crisp version of Martin Bell in a light-coloured suit.

He has recently moved from a large corporate reseller turning over about #70m a year, where he managed a large sales and administration team, to a small internet service provider (ISP) with a turnover of around #5m and nine staff with seven vacancies. The tale he told was firstly one of culture shock ? the second element was his tale of the recruitment nightmare that faces our whole industry (see next week for that story).

His company is one of the top five and has just launched a range of corporate value-added services and a reseller programme. The potential looks good, but there are some problems to overcome and his company is not alone with its experiences. He is at the sharp end in the growth of nerdism.

The parallels with the nerdish employees of Silicon Valley are quite startling. The UK internet market is best described as laid back as far as the staff are concerned. They are generally very young, but if they get the job done they think they can dress as they like and talk back as much as they want. But if they know their internet, they are worth their weight in killer applications.

There are cultural problems, however: the average age of 27 and lack of experience means that many do not know the difference between Nat West Bank and Nat West Markets. Neither have they heard of some of the biggest resellers. So they don?t dress in corporate style ? more like Manchester Airport runway style. Hence my friend?s dramatic shift in dress sense. At 41 he has to try to fit in somehow.

His biggest problem, however, is his salesforce?s reluctance to spend time out of hours wining and dining corporate clients. Is the new generation of salespeople going to leave corporate clients hanging around bars with no one to buy from? Unfortunately not. As commercial realities take a grip of this new industry and it starts to sell to corporates, the old-fashioned dress code and the traditional selling methods will reassert themselves. But I still half expect him to be wearing a shell suit next time we meet.