Selling Is About Helping People….

In recent conversations with friends like Brent Adamson, Charlie Green, Mark Modesti, Alice Heiman, and others a common theme keeps surfacing: “Selling is about helping people….”

Over the past years, too many seem to have forgotten this. Or people new to selling have never learned this. The focus is about our own success, our objectives. The customer becomes the object, perhaps obstacle to our success. We’ve redesigned our engagement processes to minimize the human connection. We design our engagement processes, optimizing for efficiency, outsourcing a much of the process as possible to AI. We avoid any human interaction unless it’s tied directly to a transaction.

Don’t get me wrong, even in my earliest days in selling, even before the wheel was invented, I was driven by achieving my quota. But in those days, as driven as we were, we recognized the importance of connecting with our customers. We would show up in their offices, meet in bars after work, see each other at conferences. And we’d pick up the phone to call them, perhaps wishing them a Happy Birthday, or just “It’s been a while since we have spoken, how are you doing?”

This doesn’t seem to be happening. Too many sellers are uninterested in engaging in conversations, unless the customer has expressed an active interest in assessing our products. And those conversations focus on convincing customers to buy our products–not understanding their problems, not understanding them as human beings. We minimize the time spent with each customer, looking at how we can allocate that time to talking to as many customers as we can.

What happens when we start to minimize human engagement and interaction? I can talk about how it adversely impacts trust and all the normal things we talk about in building relationships in selling, but there is something more fundamental that underlies this.

Minimizing human engagement erodes the customers’ experiences and our own learning, growth and fulfillment.

In the process of minimizing customer engagement, we never build trust. We don’t build trust by the references we provide, the information and data demonstrating what we can do, the slickness of our demos, or even the words we say. We build trust in the unscripted moments–a smile and momentary eye contact, a shared laugh, a momentary connection of two human beings.

We talk about FOMU, FOFU, FOMO and other things. These arise not from the data, facts, or the mechanics of the transaction, they arise because of human emotions, the need to be heard, understood, and a sense of belonging.

The loss is not just on the customer side. Seller’s experience loss as we minimize human connection and interaction. That same sense of belonging of connection is critical. It creates meaning, growth, and joy. It keeps us going when we struggle to achieve our goals.

Sale is one of the few professions that, by design, requires us to reach out and connect with people–other human beings. And in these connections, while we may be talking about problems and solutions, underlying each of these conversations are the hopes, dreams, fears, and ambitions of each person we talk to.

While it’s trite, we talk about how people make decisions with their hearts, rationalizing them with their minds. We have optimized our engagement processes around their minds, completely bypassing that most important factor in their making a decisions.

And, if we take a step back, this isn’t just a buying/selling problem. It’s a societal problem. The more we substitute efficiency, the more we rely on our technology based/social networks, the more we isolate/insulate ourselves, the more we lose of what it means to be human.

How do we start bringing the human connection back into what we do? How do we start rebuilding the connections that fulfill both us and our customers? Some ideas:

1. Pick up the phone and call a customer or prospect you haven’t spoken to in at least six months. Don’t try to qualify them or do a discovery call, just ask them how they are doing, what’s happening with them–in their lives and in their jobs. Share something about what’s happening with you.
2. With your colleagues, step away from the job. Grab a beer or coffee, talk about what’s going on in each others lives. Share a smile, perhaps a few laughs, learn something new about each other.
3. When you are engaged in a buying process, shift your agenda. It’s not about being tightly tied to our scripts and playbooks, but step back to talk about what’s happening with them. When you are talking about the problems, listen beyond the facts/figures about the problem to learn about what it means to them.
4. Invest some time in being inefficient. Stop worrying about volume/velocity and activity metrics, take time to chat and share experiences. Maybe what happened on the weekend, a sports event, a movie. Connect with people beyond the task at hand.
5. Send notes to people, just checking in, or congratulating them on something they may have accomplished.

Selling is about helping people–connecting with them. Even a few minutes of human to human connection, the smile, eye contact has such enduring impact.

Selling is about helping people—helping our customers and helping create more meaning and joy in what we do.

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  I recognize the huge irony in having these AI generated characters talking about the “human connection.”  There are some hallucinations–the title of this post and a few other.  They are small, but bring a smile.  Despite all of these, it’s a great discussion.