Sellers, Are You Really Interested In Selling?

Without a doubt, selling is a really hard job. Regardless what role you hold in selling, it is very difficult. We get more “No’s” than “Yes’s.” We have to find ways of engaging people who do everything they can to resist those efforts. We have aggressive goals we must meet. We are often driven by high levels of activity. At the same time, there are endless details and minutia that we have to do as part of the jobs in selling. Finally, while we sell change, the rate at which we have to change to achieve our goals can be overwhelming.

Unless you are really interested in what you do as a Seller, doing any job in selling can be crushing.  Recently, I read one of Paul Graham’s pieces on “How To Do Great Work.”  (This is a stunning essay, I’ll come back to this again and again in future posts).  One of the first issues he address is “being deeply interested.”

What does it mean to be “deeply interested?”

1.  Excessive curiosity–to the degree it might bore others.  This is about everything having to do with selling–what drives customers, how they buy, how we help them buy, how sellers do great work, learning from what other great sellers do, and more.
2. Deep attention to the details.  The curiosity drives deeply interested people into the details of doing the work.  They want to understand everything about what they are doing and how they might do it better.  They recognize the real difference in performance is hidden in the little things and details of doing that work.  They probe to understand, refine, and execute all of these.
3. Experimentation, the deeply interested develop their own ideas and approaches.  They are constantly seeking to refine what they do and how they do it.  As a result, they try new things, learning both from their successes and failures.
4. Pursue ideas that are ambitious.  They set big goal, constantly figuring out how to achieve them.  Perhaps looking at this crassly, quota is something they pass on the way to achieving their goals, it’s not the goal itself.  Likewise comp is a result of them achieving their goals, but they are driven by the goal, not by this result.
5. Preserving a sense of excitement in what they are doing.  Because they are curious, because they are ambitious, and experiment, there is an underlying excitement in doing the work.
6. While competitive and constantly learning from what they see others doing, they are less driven by “beating the competition,” more focuses on what they are discovering, learning, and achieving themselves.  Copying and emulating that which others do is inconceivable.
7. Diversified learning, while they are deeply focused on what they do, they recognize they can learn so much from others and other areas, taking those ideas and adapting them to help them achieve their own goals.

We see many of these characteristics in the consistent top performers in all aspects of selling.

The most interesting conversations I have are with those who are deeply interested in selling.

I worry, as I talk to so many sellers.  So many don’t seem interested, let alone deep interest.  It’s a job, it’s something that funds their real interests.  It’s something they do because they don’t know what else to do.  It’s the first job they got, they just keep doing it.  Too many don’t seem to be driven about getting better, rather focus on getting along.

One of the most fascinating things I’ve experienced in my career is the conversations I have with sellers.  Perhaps over a cup of coffee, more likely over a beer.  Of course in those conversations there’s the obligatory whining about management and our own companies, the customer, the competition and all those things.  But eventually we get talking about selling, our passion for it, our drive to improve and get better.  Respected colleagues talking about their struggle, things they do to overcome them, wild ideas they have, things they are thinking about.

There’s something about selling and the immense challenge all sellers face which drive some of the most interesting conversations I have the privilege of participating in.  Each conversation is fascinating.  While we may have our disagreements, we come out of them learning something which we might experiment with in our own efforts.

There are few things more challenging and exciting.

I wonder, why anyone who isn’t interested in selling would choose to do something that is so difficult?  There are much easier ways to make a living.