Sales isn’t easy! If it was, it could be totally automated and our customers and companies wouldn’t need sales people. We continue to see those parts of selling carved away, with more effective and efficient channels being leveraged—as they should be!
We don’t create value in those areas, we only create cost—for our customers and our companies.
While everyone, from the entry level sales person to top sales executives, readily acknowledge the complexities and challenges our customers face and the complexity and challenges we face on engaging them, what I continue to see is people and organizations pursuing the easy and simplistic.
People rush like lemmings to the latest new-new thing. Whether it’s social selling, the latest greatest technology, the 12 new ways of getting customers to open emails, the 15 new ways to close the order, the latest science behind high volume and high velocity, or the ease with which we can inundate/broadcast via the web.
It seems to be human nature to opt for easy/quick, or to address symptoms rather than doing the hard work of really understanding, learning, identifying the most critical issues and changing.
In many ways, too often, the latest techniques/tools/technologies promoted by self proclaimed gurus, experts, technology vendors are a little like a “sugar high.”
We all know that spike of energy we get when we down a soft drink or take a bite of candy. It rushes to our blood streams, we get a surge of energy and go forward. Inevitably, that rush dissipates. Then we seek another sugar high, and another, and another.
We learn these sugar high’s don’t have a sustained impact. We learn, in fact, over time they actually do more damage than they do good.
Seeking the easy and simplistic in sales is like seeking a sugar high. It may produce a short term bump in the results we produce. But quickly, we find it’s seldom sustainable. As the “high” diminishes, we seek another and another. We see short term impacts (bloggers blog, speakers speak, pundits pundit, vendors make case studies), but it’s seldom sustainable.
The concept permeates our vocabularies, as we continually search for “quick hits.”
And over time, we often find these approaches do more damage than they do good.
We lose our ability or willingness to do the hard work, we don’t do the research, we don’t prepare, we don’t really engage our customers in understanding their goals and problems, we don’t challenge them to think differently, we don’t help them learn, we don’t know how to create and co-create value. We lose our ability to think critically, to adapt, to change.
We double down on what we have always done, even if these things no longer produce results. It’s far easier to do those things, than to figure out what’s changed, how we need to change, and actually change.
And the results show it! Both in terms of the declining percent of sales people and organizations making plan, the feedback/avoidance we see from customer, and any number of measures.
At the risk of over using my “sugar high” analogy, we know how hard it is to break the sugar addiction. But we also know the results of adopting a healthier life style–what it does for our health, energy, ability to engage, and ability to create.
The same thing happens when we stop focusing on the easy, quick answers, when we start looking at fundamentals, addressing the tough issues in substantive way, committing to a “sales healthy” (perhaps customer healthy) approach to producing results and sustaining performance.
We see others who have done this, those that are recognized leaders and have the ability to sustain that leadership. Ironically, it is the consistent top performers that never take the shortcuts, never succumb to the fads and fashions, but do the hard work that produces results year after year. Yes they do adopt new methods, approaches and tools, but it’s grounded in the basics that drive success, not as a quick fix.
Easy and simplistic don’t work over time. They are damaging. It’s time we stop wasting time on these and do the hard work of producing sustained results. It’s time we start pushing back on those that focus only on the easy, they aren’t helping us, they may be harming us.
Just commit to doing the work!
My first sales manager (and a very good one) used to say, “Sales is the easiest job in the world if you work it hard BUT the hardest job in the world if you work it easy”
Greg, clearly he was very wise 😉