Nigeria lacks sales people to sell made-in-Nigeria products – 1

President Buhari spoke in favour of it. Vice President
Osinbajo is in support. In fact, it will be difficult to
find any well-informed Nigerian who disagrees with
the campaign to “Buy Made In Nigeria Goods”. Then,
why has our import bill been rising and few people
actually patronize those products? The answer is
simple: we have no sales people who can sell Made
In Nigeria Goods – which is like moving a mountain.
We lack the sales people because we keep on
making several mistakes.
Made-in-Nigeria campaign
The first mistake is the notion that good products
sell themselves and all our manufacturers and
producers have to do is to produce such products. It
is pertinent in this regard to draw attention to my
first course in Marketing during my MBA programme
in Boston in 1968. The Professor entered and asked
all of us: “Do you believe that the world would rush
to the gate of the fellow who invented a better
mouse trap?”
That was the idea made famous by American
philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1883. We,
unanimously, agreed. Then, the Professor with scorn
in his voice asked why a product regarded as the
best in its product class was not selling as well as
three competitive brands. We were speechless. That
was how my education on Marketing and Sales
started forty-nine years ago. It has not ended. It
didn’t take long to realize that the “best” product is
not often the largest selling, but the best sold
product wins the prize.
Years ago, at the Nigerian Institute of Management,
as a Senior Lecturer/Consultant/ Researcher, I
conducted a study on preferences for fuel brands –
TEXACO, TOTAL, MOBIL and AGIP – asking motorist
which station sells the best petrol. TOTAL was first;
followed by MOBIL, TEXACO and AGIP. The
astonishing thing about the result was the fact that
all the marketers collected their fuel from the same
source – NNPC. The product was the same. Despite
that, “sensible” motorists actually believed one
petrol brand was better than others.
I conducted a mini-study two years ago on noodles –
INDOMIE and HONEYWELL. I served people cooked
noodles while switching the labels. More than
seventy per cent of those who consumed
HONEYWELL thinking it was INDOMIE said they
enjoyed their INDOMIE while only forty per cent of
those eating HONEYWELL expressed satisfaction.
The difference might not be in the taste alone but in
something else – selling. Perhaps the most
aggressive sales people in that sector are those
guys and girls selling INDOMIE.
So, the first lesson we need to learn is that
products, irrespective of quality don’t sell
themselves. Some well-trained people need to sell
them. I will return to this shortly before closing this
first part.
The second mistake we make is that Made In
Nigeria products will be bought by Nigerians out of
patriotism or because the President or Ministers ask
Nigerians to do so. To start with, this is not the first
government to ask us to buy locally manufactured
products.
I returned to Nigeria in 1974 to find several factories
opened at Apapa, Ikeja, Ilupeju in Lagos, Aba, Trans
Amadi Layout in Portharcourt, Ilorin, Bompai in Kano
and Kaduna sending out textiles, batteries, soap,
detergents, packaged food, drugs, bicycles, plastic
containers, beer, shoes, vegetable oil, stout, foam
mattresses etc.
To support them, the Gowon administration launched
a Buy Made In Nigeria Promotion. Murtala
Mohammed and Obasanjo continued the campaign;
so did Buhari and Babangida. Few of those factories
remain open today; the textile mills can be likened
to building a monument to a war we lost.
But, before the reader thinks this is a uniquely
Nigerian problem, let me quickly add that in the
1960s the number of Japanese cars on American
roads in any city could be counted on the fingers of
a hand. Today millions of foreign cars are sold in
the US; not because America has no car
manufacturers or they have reached their production
capacity, but because the consumers have been
successfully sold something else by somebody else.
I bought two Volvos while in the US and only one
Chevrolet because a Volvo salesman came to my
door.
To the question “why”? the short and almost
hundred per cent accurate answer is SELLING. Let
me illustrate with three examples for which there
are witnesses alive in Nigeria.
For the first, one Dapo Ayorinde, FCA, I hope, and
Ms Yomi Martins, female pharmacist, are my
witnesses. I was recruited by SmithKline and French,
now a part of GlaxoSmithKline, a global drug
company, in 1979 to head their Sales Team. I was
not a pharmacist and the Managing Director who
recruited me knew that.
In fact, he recruited me from BOOTS COMPANY
NIGERIA LIMITED, another global drug firm, without
advertising the post as was customary in those days
and he told me that SmithKline was about to launch
a new product – TAGAMET – into Nigeria and he
needed a good salesman to lead his team – all
pharmacists. He did not make the mistake that
TAGAMET, a revolutionary treatment for peptic,
gastro-intestinal ulcer as well as reflux which was
the very best; the leading edge in the treatment of
ulcer worldwide would sell itself.
It had to be sold. When the pharmacists I was to
lead threatened mass resignation, a new MD,
replacing the fellow who recruited me, pleaded with
them to be patient with the company. Later, I called
the staff myself and promised them to resign in six
months if they ask me to do so.
When I voluntarily resigned two years after in 1981
to go selling beer in Kano they all pleaded with me
not to go – all the way to our office in the UK. All
the pharmacists had become aggressive
salespeople. We had phenomenal sales growth in the
two years because nobody was allowed the
complacency that goes with the feeling that “good
products sell themselves”.

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