“It’s Better To Look Good Than Be Good….”

Andy Paul and I were having what I’ve labeled “The Old Fart Conversations About Selling.” Neither of us feel we are out of touch with modern selling, the challenges both buyers and sellers face. Both of us embrace all sorts of technologies very quickly, as an example we both are actively developing AI based tools. Each of us talk to thousands of sellers and customers every year, and Andy’s podcasts reach 10s to 100s of thousands more.

But every once in a while we get on a call to discuss “What’s happening in selling?” And we are totally bewildered by things we see happening in sales. We ask ourselves, “What are we missing?”

Andy made a comment, “Sales is becoming so performative….” We started diving into what that means, I won’t discuss it much in this post, Andy’s writing a fantastic book that goes deeply into this. But the conversation reminded me of the old Billy Crystal “Fernando” sketches on SNL. He always said, in a very affected accent, “It’s better to look good than feel good” and “You look marvelous…”

Reflecting on our conversation and the performative aspects of selling, it seems too many are living by a mantra, “It’s better to look good than do good.” And we have the goal of “We look marvelous.”

Somehow our technology stacks are a representation of our sophistication in our sales execution strategies. We brag about how much technology we have available, yet CRM compliance is one of the biggest issues I see in too many organizations. Most of the technology is not well utilized, but the more technology we have apparently makes us “look good.”

That technology has provided us with endless data and reports about everything we do. We can analyze every word our people and our customers speak on phone or Zoom calls. We have huge insights, “You didn’t ask 4 questions and swear once… You really need to do that to have the highest impact sales calls….” But we don’t pay attention to that and we don’t leverage conversational intelligence to it’s greatest impact.

We can track every digital interaction our customers have had, we have tools that recommend who and how we should engage those customers, yet every prospecting out reach is, “We are the world leader in these solutions, can we schedule a demo…..”

We have pipeline and other performance data to help us understand our business, and we accept 15-20% win rates, fewer than 40% of our people hitting their numbers, 80+ percent of our customers preferring rep-free buying experiences, and 60+percent ending with doing nothing. But we revel in the data and analytics we have at our fingertips.

We are proud of our ARR growth and our ability to scale, yet we are spending more to get the revenue than the revenue we produce. But we’ve invented a way to rationalize this, bragging about our “Rule of 40,” and our potential market cap—yet we have never seen a penny of profit and have no plans to ever see one.

We talk about our rich comp plans and potential OTE. We create cool companies to work at with kitchens, great food, gyms, Friday afternoon social hours, yet average tenure is 11-18 months.

We talk about the importance of leveraging social channels, measure our success by numbers of connections/followers and likes. We reach out to make connections with tremendous insight, “Dave, we have a few follower in common…. Dave, let us do your lead gen…. Dave, how are things going…..” And we have endless thought leaders and gurus advising us to do these things.

We read the right books, take the right sales training, listen to the right podcasts, but we fail to apply the principles in those. It just feels good and we get to hang out with the cool kids.

I can go on, but you get the point.

We have fully bought into the concept, “It’s better to look good than be good…” and we want to “look marvelous!”

Oh, I forgot, when we respond to each other we get whole wardrobes of logo tee shirts, fleece vests, caps, as well as all the Yeti cups and thermos’s—so we can have pictures of us actually wearing “cool logos” and looking marvelous…..

Buying and selling is messy, particularly for customers. They don’t know how to buy, wander, and most often fail. Selling is messy, while we know the principles, we may have great processes and tools in place, sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes as the customer shifts, we need to shift. Things don’t happen as we predict or want, so we have to continue to readjust our strategies. Winning is messy, but winning produces results. Losing maybe messier, but the best performers take the time to understand what happened and what they might change.

We miss forecasts and target close dates, despite the plans we put in place.

But the best care less about looking good, but producing results. They are agile, adaptable, tough minded, and have the ability to figure things out.

They seem to be the exceptions, but, sadly, the rest seem captured by the mantra:

“It’s better to look good than do good….. We look marvelous…..”