Hard selling for a hard result
Sherrif says he learned most of his selling skills while he was the head of NACROD, a welfare organisation looking after the physically disabled. “We needed to raise a lot of money for our operations, for the schools and the vehicles we used to transport the students around in and so on. In order to do that I had to sell my charity to donors who were already helping out other charities. That meant constantly innovating to highlight the needs of the physical disabled as compared to other forms of disability. In one campaign in 1993, I really took a hard selling approach, and I learned that can work wonders in the right environment. I raised R130,000 in a single night and a further R160,000 within the next week – a substantial amount in the early-1990s – just based on that campaign. That is how I learned my selling skills,” he says.

Selling by proving the concept
While at Radio Lotus some years ago, Sherrif was having trouble snaring a leading car manufacturer to advertise. He challenged that company that if he could prove that the majority of that manufacturer’s buyers in KwaZulu-Natal were Indian, they would advertise on Radio Lotus, an Indian-focused radio station, and they agreed. So he placed a student at the doorway of ten different dealerships and ordered them to request the family name of every person that walked in. He was proved right, and armed with a list full of Maharajs, Naidoos and Khans, he finally got a commitment from that manufacturer.
He employed a similar approach when trying to attract advertising from a leading peri-peri chicken restaurant chain. “I told them that Indians like hot food and that their chicken was the closest thing to spicy Indian chicken on the market. They didn’t believe me, so I told them I would prove it. We had a festival for Radio Lotus and I told them to bring a mobile kitchen and sell their chicken to the people attending the festival. When they sold out completely within two hours, they finally understood my point,” he says.

Employing Mafia tactics
Sherrif believes that if you don’t stand out in sales, you cannot win. In a classic example, eTV had a ‘Mafia Month’ in which viewers were treated to classic gangster movies. In order to generate advertising sales for that month, he hired some ‘gangsters’, dressed them up as Mafiosi and literally ’kidnapped’ media buyers from their offices. “Nobody knew what was going on. My guys walked into their offices, identified the right person and told them they were being kidnapped. They took them away to the eTV offices, and when they got here, I called their secretaries and said I have this person here and unless I receive a commitment of advertising for R200,000 from them, I am not letting them go until the end of the business day. So if their calendar is important to you, you had better send through forms for them to sign right now,” says Sherrif.
It was of course unthreatening, and intended only as a fun way of drawing attention to Mafia month. But it was also well received. That day, eTV received advertising commitments totalling R2.7 million.
“It’s about being innovative,” he says. “It’s about being different.”

Trust is the only control
Sherrif chooses to operate his sales teams completely without controls. He calls it “living the Google story,” referring to the famous Internet company which is defined by unconstrained innovation. “I believe that people must be free. Therefore I don’t manage their time. I manage only their output. I don’t care if they come here at eight and leave at five or come here at eleven and leave at eight. I don’t care if I don’t see someone for three days. Here it is all about trust,” he says.
It is that message that he hammers home to his people with tireless reiteration. “Many salespeople will say they are going to a client when in fact they are going to do something personal. But that doesn’t happen here because I drive home honesty. My reward was that one day as I was driving down Fourth Avenue in Parkhurst I saw one of my guys sitting at one of the trendy restaurants there, and I decided to see if he listens to what he has been taught. So I called him and asked him where he was. He said: “Khalik, I am on Fourth Avenue, having lunch with my friends.” I nearly jumped out of my car, shouting with glory because it was proof that my system works. In the next staff meeting, I applauded the guy,” says Sherrif. “My salespeople are responsible for their own actions. I treat them as professionals.”

Why pick one when you can have all five
Because of eTV’s very rigorous recruitment process, the candidates that ultimately make it to selection are often hard to choose between. That doesn’t rattle Sherrif however. Once, when faced with five excellent candidates and unwilling to see any of them go to the competition, he simply hired all five. “The finance people were screaming at me, telling me that I didn’t have the budget, and I told them that we were making an investment and would exceed whatever budget overrun there was, by more than ten times within the first three months. In the end, they all fitted in and have really added value to the team,” he says.

Spending money to make money
Among the sales tools that Sherrif uses, he makes a habit of taking customers to the best soccer events in the world every single year. Most recently that meant 19 clients and their partners going to the FIFA World Cup in Germany. That process inevitably brings up the question about whether securing sales in exchange for trips overseas is ethical, but Sherrif declares it a moot argument. “It is part of the game. What it does is create outstanding relationships with the people on whom you can call. As all sales professionals know, making the call and getting the person you are calling to accept your appointment is the first step to securing a sale,” he says.
“Media agents have a need to buy television for their clients so the only choice is where to spend it. Do they give 20% to each of the five channels, or do they give 40% of their spend to the one that is top of mind? It is a means of crystalising the basic steps in the sales process: making sure that the client grants you an appointment. Now, when my people call such a client, he knows who they are and he has a good association with them. We don’t see it only as a means of getting immediate spend, but also as a means of creating or maybe changing a relationship.”

Mumbai MBA in a day
One of Sherrif’s innovations is what he calls the Mumbai MBA in a Day; a life-skills course like nothing you are likely to have ever experienced. The concept came to him through his wife, while they were shopping in a clothing store in Mumbai, in India. “The concept came from the experience of dealing with the salespeople,” says Sherrif.
“You can’t even think about being a better negotiator than they are in Mumbai. It is amazing. The shop owner has blouses from floor to ceiling, more than 2000 of them, all in neat packaging and all stacked up and my wife tells him that she wants a white blouse in a certain size. And the next thing you know, the guy is running around pulling down a red one and a blue one and a green one and unwrapping them and letting her feel the fabric, and showing her alternatives she hadn’t ever even considered,” says Sherrif.
“By the time he got to the white one, which is the one she wanted, the only size they had was too big. So he hands it to his colleague to take upstairs to the tailor, who makes it her size, right there on the spot. But by now she is looking at the others and thinking about how the red one will go with a certain skirt and how her sister might like the pink one, so that when the white one comes down, she has decided to take some others. And in the mean time he is speaking to you, offering you tea or a Coke, asking where you are from and negotiating a price with you. She went in looking for a white one and came out with three, feeling on top of the world. The guy did his job,” says Sherrif.
It got Sherrif thinking and ultimately led to an innovative life-skills course. Earlier this year he took 44 salespeople from his team to Mumbai in order to experience it as he had.
The group was divided into 11 teams of four and each was given $400 to go and purchase an outfit for one member of the team who would be required to model it 48 hours later. They were given a video camera to record all of the negotiating and were required to keep a complete financial record of everything.
“The outfits they presented and the things that they achieved and experienced were really of a top class. And I can tell you that their lives were touched and changed by the learnings, the negotiations and the overcoming of language barriers,” says Sherrif.
The idea worked so well that Sherrif followed it up with an identical trip involving 12 salespeople and 24 media agency customers.
“The streets of Mumbai are my university for the Mumbai MBA in a Day,” he says.

Khalik’s tip for Sales Performers
“You cannot do well in sales unless you are honest and have a positive attitude. Honesty shows respect to the team, to yourself and to your leader. And if you are honest, you can be trusted to do a good job. You cannot sell if you have a negative frame of mind,” says Sherrif.
He follows through on that too: in his own office if there is anyone who is negative or preoccupied with a personal issue, he sends them home and tells them to come back onoly when they are happy. He leads a team of positive, happy people.

Khalik’s tip for Sales Leaders
“Your recruitment process must be thorough. We don’t employ people, we invite them to join us. It may sound only semantically different, but for us, by the time a potential salesperson has made it through to me, they have gone through six weeks of gruelling interviewing and we know for a fact that the person has a winning track record and a winning formula. You don’t employ such people, you invite them to join you.”

< Back