Librarians as salespeople?

From LLN

Librarians as salespeople?

Contents 1 Academic librarians are not salespeople but they should be 1.1 Excerpts from comments 2 Didn't know I needed to be a salesperson 2.1 Excerpts from the comments 3 Related articles 4 Your turn: Talk about it

Do library leaders need to be salespeople? Do librarians who are not leaders need to be salespeople? Is a direct salesmanship model pushing libraries too far into a business model?

Academic librarians are not salespeople but they should be

By Steven Bell. Excerpted and adapted from this March 24, 2009 post at ACRLog. Used by permission.

I participated in this year’s Taiga forum... Somewhere during the discussions one of the participants said something along the lines of “Academic librarians are not good salespeople.” I can’t quite recall how that came up but it struck a chord with me because I’ve thought the same exact thing for quite a few years. Frontline librarians need to do more than just respond when the end users are looking for information. They’ve got to be out in the field spreading the word, and making the sales pitch for why the library’s resources are vitally important to the teaching and learning process.

Here’s an example. I was at a meeting last week of our Distance Learning Advisory Group. Our leader asked me to say a few words about how the Library supports online learners --and where we need to improve. As I finished one faculty member blurted out “I had no idea I could do at that with your resources.” How many times does that happen? Too many. We’re also doing LibQual+ and there are far too many comments with suggestions for what the library should be offering--that we’ve already been offering for two or more years. They don’t know it. There’s a disconnect. On the other hand we’ve got 35,000 students, over 1,000 faculty and 12 reference librarians. That’s a whole lot of sales calls for everyone. So we’ve got to figure out how to be a truly effective salesforce. Maybe this new book (Marketing Today's Academic Library by Brian Mathews) will give me some ideas for better marketing and promotion methods.

To tell the truth the best library salesperson I ever worked with wasn’t a librarian. At a prior job the instructional technologist who helped our faculty learn the courseware system and other learning tools was far more effective than any librarian at getting our faculty to integrate the library into their courses. He’d be telling them about all the technology tools, and then he’d slip in “Well you are going to integrate the library databases in here, right?” And from there he just did a good sales pitch and then the librarians took over and closed the deal (it’s as simple as ABC - Always Be Closing!).

Maybe the next set of Taiga provocative statements will include “Within the next 5 years all librarians will work strictly on commission earning revenue everytime one of their clients searches a database, acquires an article through interlibrary loan, or requests an instruction session.” With the way our economy is going, who knows.

Editor's note: This post began with a discussion of the "provocative statements" that come out of the Taiga forum and musings on why the 2009 statements haven't received much attention.

Excerpts from comments

• Barbara Fister: "I’m tempted to write a book with a Stanely Fish-esque title: Librarians Are Not Salespeople And It’s a Good Thing Too. Really--how many of us need more pushy salespeople in our lives? Imagine going into a library and having a bunch of piranhas descend… And what will be gained if we push people to use library resources just to push them? Why not just become textbook reps if you want to sell stuff? It seems to me one of the things libraries are all about is making your own choices--not being prodded to consume because consuming is its own reward."
• Steven Bell in response: "When I read a report like the one from Project Information Literacy that confirms that students don’t know what we offer and are overwhelmed by the choices they do find--well, just how exactly are they supposed to make their own choices? They are making a choice: They go to everywhere but the library for their information and that’s the one choice we can’t afford. When I say “we need to be more like salespeople” that doesn’t mean we should all become obnoxious used car salespeople. It’s not about “pushy” but it is about “persuasion.” My point is that we have to be assertive and get out of the library and let faculty know what we have and how to best use it. It’s not about pushing people to use our resources just because we have it. It’s about helping them to make the right choices and putting the resources where they can be readily found and used. If we just wait around for the customers...to figure it out and make the right choice that’s a surefire recipe for making ourselves obsolete."
• Barbara Fister in response: "Oh! You mean teaching!! Okay."
• Maura Smale: "I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the growing value of marketing skills in our information-rich world. As the amount of available content...increases, is it harder for “the good stuff” to rise to the top organically?... Strong content is necessary, of course, but perhaps strong marketing is, too, in order to help users differentiate between the many, many options available... I must admit that I’m not entirely comfortable with an increased focus on marketing. My job involves lots of faculty outreach and collaboration as well as teaching, which I love. But I find that too much time spent in salesperson mode (e.g. working on library PR materials) can make me weary. It seems to me that many librarians are firmly on the introvert side--I think it might be difficult for the profession to focus on marketing as much as we may need to in the coming years. The book you point to is a great start, and perhaps professional development courses or webinars as well?"
• Marilyn R. Pukkila: "And here I’ve been secretly hoping that the recent financial crisis would finally push us to question the notion that a market/business model is the be-all and end-all for any endeavor, most especially education! For myself, I, like Barbara, think that “teacher” sums it up pretty well, though I’ll also accept the term “advocate.” “Salesperson” just doesn’t cut it, since I’m not selling anything, and “marketer” ditto--it’s a library, not a marketplace! That doesn’t mean I won’t become familiar with marketing techniques and choose to use those I find appropriate for the setting and the patrons... But words have power, and they convey meanings; I want the people I work with and for to know what I am and what I do. Even if they have only a vague notion of what “librarian” means, it certainly means something different than “marketer” or “salesperson”—and well it should!

Didn't know I needed to be a salesperson

By Meredith Farkas. Excerpted and adapted from this April 10, 2009 post at Information wants to be free. Used with permission.

Yes, I knew I’d have to teach people how to use email. And unjam printers. And help people use copiers. But I don’t think I ever understood in library school how important sales and marketing would be to the success of our profession.

Within a month of starting work as the Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University four years ago, I was painfully aware of that fact and felt woefully unprepared to play the role of salesman.

I laugh at how naive I was back then. I just assumed that faculty, who were complaining about the poor quality of sources students were using for graduate-level research, would welcome my offer to teach their students how to find and evaluate information resources. I assumed that if I put up information about all of the library resources and services available to them, students would look at it. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. True, some faculty/administrators were very interested in information literacy instruction, and some students were really up on what the library had to offer. But for the most part, I found I had to do a lot more “selling” than I’d ever anticipated.

[Quotes portion of Steven Bell's commentary above, from "Somewhere during..." through "or more years."]

I’ve seen that in our assessments too, and it frustrates me to no end when I see that we are offering something they want and they just don’t know it. And a lot of the time, I’m not quite sure how to tell them about it. It’s not as difficult with our undergraduate population, because we reach nearly all of them as freshmen with library instruction, and we deal with them in the physical world all the time. But there is no “captive audience” element with our distance learning population. They don’t even have required synchronous components to their program where we could come in as guest speakers and make our “pitch.” All of the information is there for them, but they have to choose to look at it. The online graduate programs are in the process of redesigning their online orientation and we’ve been able to insert library learning activities for students to complete where they can’t get to the next section of their orientation until they do them. This will at least get them looking at our website and using some key resources in their discipline, but I still don’t feel it will do enough to make them aware of what we have to offer.

I feel strongly that library schools need to teach marketing and salesmanship to future librarians. We don’t all come to the profession with those skills, and the idea of selling library services to faculty can be daunting for the new professional. We go into library school thinking we’re going to help people who want our help, and then we find we have to convince people to accept our help, which is a whole other kettle of fish.

...Ken Haycock (Director of SJSU’s SLIS program) mentioned to me that they offer a marketing class and it receives very low enrollment. This tells me there is a real disconnect between the skills libraries need and what library school students think librarians need. Maybe they don’t see marketing enough in job descriptions and job requirements. Or maybe marketing shouldn’t be its own class. Maybe it should be taught as part of classes on public librarianship, academic librarianship, school librarianship, law librarianship, etc., with information on how to “sell” to the stakeholders in each area. As you can see in "Stepping on toes: the delicate art of talking to faculty about questionable assignments" (from one of my favorite blogs, In the library with the lead pipe) many librarians feel uncomfortable putting themselves out there and making suggestions to faculty.

In terms of what Steven Bell wrote, I think it’s more about advocacy, persuasion, outreach and marketing than “sales” in the business sense (or is that just a semantic distinction because we don’t want to feel like used-car salesmen?), but I’m sure we could learn a lot from salespeople that would inform our ability to market library resources to our patrons. And whatever you call it, librarians and LIS educators need to make it clear to LIS students that marketing/outreach/advocacy is a critical skill for all professionals.

Excerpts from the comments

• Dan Owens: "As a current LIS student I am constantly struck by the gulf between what is taught in library schools (or at least taught well) and the concerns of practicing librarians. Nowhere is that more apparent than advocacy and marketing... I am fortunate enough to attend a library school with an excellent instructor who teaches a “Marketing the Library” course. But she, while full-time, is not a professor. And library schools won’t give this the proper attention it deserves until somebody gets tenure for writing a killer library advocacy and marketing plan. Then again, I suppose it is that way for many of the skills librarians wish were taught in LIS schools."
• Steven Bell: "There’s no question that library workers can find business terminology, models and practices offputting. We’re not a business. They’re not customers. However, sometimes using a business concept is the easiest way to get a message across... We can’t just sit on our butts and wait for people to find out about all the great stuff we offer. It’s up to us to create the awareness and demonstrate why our services and resources add value... Outreach, advocacy, promotion: those are all the sorts of things that salespeople do--although a real sales person is a bit pushier and may stretch the truth every now and then. That’s not what I expect a librarian to be doing. But salespeople also make calls to their potential customers. That makes sense because you never know when you will sell someone on the experience the product delivers.

Related articles

• Advocacy and marketing - Another approach to promoting your library, with initial thoughts from Leigh Ann Vrabel and char booth.
• Demonstrating library value - Showing stakeholders that libraries provide good value.
• Customer spoken here - Speaking the language of users while selling library services.
• Marketing notes - A variety of library and non-library notes.
• Brands offers notes on brands and branding for libraries and in general
• Telling the library story - A set of commentaries on communicating what the library has to offer.

Your turn: Talk about it

Check out--and add to--the additional material on the Talk page.