As sellers a large part of our job is providing answers. Our customers want to know about our products, we provide them endless amounts of features, functions, feeds, and speeds. We do demos, becoming experts at show and tell (I sure could have used those skills in kindergarten).
So much of our training focuses on giving us the answers so that we can respond to our customers’ search for answers. Sometimes, we even get to the point of suggesting questions they should be asking, because we already know the answers to those questions.
But we are missing something critical to our ability to engage our customers. It’s the experience of what it takes to generate the answers. What we have to think about, how we discover, what it means, why it’s important, what the struggles and challenges are.
What we discover is the answers are less important than the thinking, process, and feelings that are generated in understanding the significance of the answers.
State differently, the real meaning and deep understanding comes from doing the work to generate the answers.
And that’s what both sellers and customers miss. Too often, we can get the answers, but they are relatively meaningless because we haven’t done the work to get and understand the answers.
It’s the foundation of human learning and experience. We learn and understand best through doing the work. It’s the process of learning what to think about, how to think, how to analyze and sort through the different answers we might develop. It’s the experience of making mistakes. Recognizing the mistakes we’ve made, how to avoid them in the future, how to correct them. It’s being forced to make choices, learning what each means, and better understanding, which might be better. It’s the total experience and understanding of how we’ve gotten to the answers and which answers we choose to focus on.
As much as I hate sports analogies, it’s very easy to look at any sport, and “understand” it. For example, tennis is very easy to understand. The different elements to the game, strategies one might undertakes, various ways to hit the ball, and so forth. It’s pretty simple. At the end, we have all the answers, we know what to do. But we don’t have the experience to actually do those things, to understand the choices we might make. We can’t play well because we haven’t done the work. We can’t coach/advise because we haven’t done the work.
Doing the work is a fundamental aspect of learning and developing competencies. It’s fundamental to understanding and making choices.
Being given the answers leaves us incapable of understanding and connecting with customers, who will have to do the work.
We talk about building skills. But building skills is about doing the work, gaining the experience, developing understanding, not getting the answers.
We know when we are coaching, we are more effective helping people learn, think, develop answers for themselves; than if we give them the answers or tell them what to do.
The current trend of giving sellers the answers and of giving customers the answers, without some level of doing the work to understand the answers is a problem. It causes us to fail, it causes our customers to fail.
Until we have actually gone through the problem solving process, done the work, we don’t have the ability to assess whether the answers are the right answers, or even the best. We don’t have the ability to evaluate which, among many possible answers might be the best for our specific situation.
And when problems arise, as they always do, if we haven’t done the work, we don’t know how to understand what’s gone wrong and how to take corrective action.
As we reflect, knowing the answers is insufficient in this complex world. Knowing how to get the answers is much more critical.
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