“I’m Trying To Think, But Nothing Happens…..”

OK, I confess, every once in a while, when I need to do something completely mindless, I go to YouTube, watching a 3 Stooges clip. There was one scene that played in dozens of variations, it’s a frustrated Curly saying, “I’m trying to think, but nothing happens…..”

Too often, in the spirit of improving efficiency and productivity, we seek to eliminate critical thinking and analysis from the work sellers do. We have tools that provide us with research about individuals and organizations. They provide endless amounts of data, we can leverage in our engagement efforts.

These tools generate insights, content, scripts, talking points that we parrot as we talk to customers. They analyze how we talk to them, suggesting changes in ask/listen, tonality, duration, and so forth. They analyze behavioral style, suggesting how we speak to the person.

They give us all the answers, theoretically, we just follow the recommendations and we will achieve success.

Inevitably, reality hits. We talk to customers, they don’t respond as scripted. They ask questions we aren’t prepared to answer, they want to talk about what they want to talk about, not what we want to talk about. We struggle with what to do.

Or we have the information or data, but we don’t know how to apply it. For example, we know the organization is struggling financially, we know the executive priorities in addressing the issues, but we can’t connect the dots to what it means to the customer we are engaging.

We have the information, but we don’t know what it means or how to apply it in the conversation!

Doing the work in selling doesn’t just mean going through the motions we’ve been programmed to do, it means doing the thinking. It means being able to understand the issues the customer raises, questioning them, probing, understanding, offering relevant insight that is unique to the customer at that moment in time.

As much as I hate sport analogies, while we can know all the “right things to do,” in playing something like golf, tennis, or skiing. But until we actually start applying these things, until we actually practice, make mistakes, learn, Having the answers is different from knowing how those answers were developed, what they mean, how to leverage these, how to probe, how to deal with different point of view.

What we miss, too often, is developing the critical thinking skills that enable us to engage our customers more deeply about the issues they care about, at the moment—or to challenge them on the issues they may not be thinking about but should be.

The good news is technology gives us so much insight, data, information, but knowing what it means, and how to leverage it seems to be the missing ingredient. Like an athlete, we need to practice, we need to learn from our mistakes, we need to learn how to adapt on the fly.

We need to learn how to think……….