FOMU, Seller Style

First, those of you who know me well, know my preferred acronym is FOFU, but FOMU is the Fear Of Messing Up. FOMU, from the customers’ perspectives has been nicely articulated my friends, Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna.

I’ve written about Buyer FOMU incessantly, helping buyers make sense of what they face, developing their confidence they are doing the right thing is critical for their success, and, ultimately, ours.

But until I attended an event last week, I never thought very deeply about the FOMU we as sellers and leaders experience. On reflection, FOMU is a part of our lives, it’s part of being a productive, engaged human being. We want to achieve, we want to grow, learn, and contribute. And, naturally, we are often frightened by the possibility of failing, or falling short.

So I want to begin a conversation about FOMU in sellers and sales leaders.

But as an important point of distinction, just as with customers we talk about sensemaking and building customer confidence, in this discussion we will focus on sensemaking and building seller confidence, which is distinctly different from seller arrogance.

When we think of our roles as sellers, we are dealing in worlds of achieving very high, sometimes unrealistic goals. We face increasing disruption within our markets, customers, and our own companies. With that disruption comes uncertainty and risk. We are tasked to engage customers, 80%+ would prefer not to see us at all, and those that do want to defer seeing us until the very last minute. We have increasing competition, the customers have far more choices than the past. Within our own organizations, we are pummeled with new products, new markets, new programs, new strategies and approaches, new technologies. And there is the ever present demand for more volume and velocity.

In many ways, selling has always been a bit of an unnatural act. Meeting people you don’t know who don’t want to talk to you. Inciting them to change. Helping them organize and manage that change effort. Helping them choose to work with you as the move forward. And doing that again and again and again. And in doing this, we lose more often than we win.

It is no wonder that sellers experience high levels of FOMU. We each want to to a good job! We each want to achieve or exceed our goals! We each want to max our comp plans. We each want to grow and learn.

And as leaders, despite our positions, we experience FOMU for many of the same reasons. Also because we are facing more complexity than we have ever experienced, yet are expected to navigate our teams, successfully, through this complexity.

It’s about time we recognize and confront the FOMU inherent in our jobs (part of me thinks that I don’t want to see someone who isn’t experiencing some level of FOMU). What is it, what do we do to build our own confidence? What do we do to maintain our confidence? How do we avoid the tendency to become overconfident or arrogant? How do we avoid the tendency to become complacent? How do we re-discover the the joy of what we do and what we help our customers, teammates and people achieve?

Some thoughts, but I hope to turn this into a conversation and get your thoughts:

1. First, recognizing that it is natural to have some sort of fear or uncertainty in what we do, that it would be unnatural not to have the apprehensions. But the point is recognizing and understanding them; then moving forward despite the discomfort.
2. FOMU is actually a necessary characteristic of any job, particularly selling and leadership. FOMU rises out of caring deeply about what you are doing, what you want to achieve. It arises from the concern around messing up–personally and for your organization. FOMU arises out of being driven to do the right thing!
3. Contrasting with the previous point, I would be deeply concerned about any individual that doesn’t experience FOMU. It means they don’t care. The absence of FOMU results in arrogance and blindness.
4. The key issue is not letting FOMU stop or paralyze us. We have to understand how we continue to move through our individual and collective FOMU. Not letting it stop us, but understanding it, analyzing it, developing an idea of how to address it, and moving forward.
5. In any sales roles we will face resistance. How do we understand the source of that resistance, how do we engage people in meaningful ways to overcome that resistance. And for those that we can’t engage, what do we learn and how do we develop the resilience to keep developing our skills to reduce that resistance.
6. Related to the previous point, we know we will lose more than we succeed. Not just the big orders, but throughout the prospecting and buying process. We will face more “No’s” than “Enthusiastic Yes’s.” However, we can’t make the mistake of accepting these losses and move on. Instead, we have to extract something from those losses, “what can we learn, what might we have done differently, were we chasing the wrong opportunity, were we competing against something that was a better solution?” Again, if we don’t learn anything from those losses, we do, in fact become lost.
7. Recognizing we are not alone in what we do, relying on teammates and our managers to help us learn, develop and grow. When I first started selling, whenever someone on the team won a very big deal, that person would take the rest of us to the bar and buy a round of drinks and we’d celebrate the win. And when someone lost a big deal, the teammates would take that person to the bar, buy that individual a drink (sometimes more), and share our experiences. We’d trade war stories about our worst losses. Sometimes, when one loses, you feel very alone. Yet we all lose, and sharing that experience and how we move forward is important to each of us.
8. As leaders, when conducting loss reviews, it must be less about, “How did you screw up,” and all about “what did we learn, what might we have done differently, did you get the help and support you needed, …… Then it’s building the confidence in helping them look at other deals to make sure they are incorporating those lessons into their deal execution strategies.
9. Acknowledging our own FOMU, helps us develop empathy for our people, teammates, and customers. Each of us is experiencing similar things, perhaps differently. But knowing this helps us connect in more empathetic ways with our customers.
10. Fundamental to addressing FOMU, whether within ourselves, our people, our customers is an open mindset. We must continue to question ourselves, the situation, and others. We must be prepared to shift or change our positions, open to alternatives and different positions. We must continue to learn.
11. As I’ve coached leaders, I’ve discovered some other common traits that help them overcome their FOMU.
    • They care deeply and genuinely about those they work with. They recognize they rely on others and others rely on them.
    • They display an almost obsessive curiosity to understand what’s happening, why, what they might do differently. They are constantly asking questions of everyone to learn.
    • Combined with that obsessive curiosity, is a problem solving orientation. They are always looking at “How do I/We deal with this?”
    • Then they are relentless in their execution of whatever course of action they take.
    • They have amazing resilience, when they fail, they learn from it, and keep moving forward.
    • They constantly learn, seeking advice/insight from others, often those with very different experience bases.

I’ll stop here, but there’s much more to discuss. I’d invite you to add your views in the comments or reach out to speak.

I’ll be coming back to this issue frequently in the coming weeks.

Concluding, it’s important to recognize, like our customers, each of us and our teams face FOMU. The better we are at recognizing our own and addressing it, the better we become in helping our customers do the same.