We Make Selling Far More Difficult Than Necessary!

Confession time. I’m terribly lazy. I want to accomplish a lot, but I want to do it with minimal effort. As I look at selling, today, it requires far too much effort—far more than I’m willing to do.

After all, we have to send 1000s of emails a day, we have to make 100s of calls, we have to spend hours doing outreach in LinkedIn and other channels. It’s harder and harder to get a response. 5 years ago, it took 200-400 touches to get a response. Today, it’s 1000-1500! Who knows what it will be next year!

And when we finally do reach someone, they don’t want to talk to us. They throw their preference for a Rep Free buying experience into our faces. They don’t care about what we sell, they don’t want to go through our demos-at least until they have no other alternative.

When we eventually find someone that wants to buy and will talk to us, 60% end in no decision made. And for those that eventually do make a decision, we end up winning about 15% of them. And to win that business, we have to discount deeply–getting approvals is such a hassle and it impacts our commissions.

I’m exhausted writing these few paragraphs! And we know it’s getting worse—buying/sales cycles are lengthening, quotas are going up, commissions are going down, more buyers don’t want anything to do with sellers, so our outreach to find a buyer continues to sky rocket.

And even with all this hard work, fewer and fewer are making their goals and achieving their OTE. Now less than 40% are doing this. The rest are working awfully hard, but not succeeding.

Faced with this, selling isn’t for the weak spirited. While I’m not weak-spirited, I’m not sure I want to work that hard!

Like so many people do, I decided to start looking for the hacks and shortcuts. How could I sell more, with much less work?

My first hack was really counterintuitive. We’ve been so focused on finding people who are interested in what we want to talk about. As the outreach data shows, every year the number of people that are interested in hearing our pitch is plummeting. I decided to take a different approach. I thought, rather than finding people interested in what I wanted to talk about, what if I started focusing on the prospects and customers, talking about what they care about? What if instead of making it about me, I made it about them?

The number of people wanting to talk about themselves, their jobs, their dreams, their challenges was stunning! It turns out people are hungry to be heard, anxious to find people that are interested in them.

While I found the number of people wanting to talk is stunning, I realized I would be spending a lot of time in interesting conversations, but not really selling a lot. I refined my approach. I started focusing on companies and people that might have the problems I solved. I figured if I started talking to them about their jobs and challenges, I’d find a reasonable number that might want to change or do something differently.

So I focused only on a very small number of companies and people. But I kept focusing on them. I wouldn’t talk about what I was selling. I kept talking to them about them and their jobs. I’d ask, “Are you achieving what you want to achieve? Why are you doing things the way you are doing it? What challenges do you face? Have you ever thought about doing something different? I saw another person in your role doing this….what if you tried it?

People responded to this. We got into fascinating discussions, they started asking me questions, “What is your experience? How are others doing this? What would you recommend? How can you help us?”

What was fascinating was that I didn’t have to try to reach hundreds or thousands of people to find someone interested in a conversation like this. It actually became dozens of people. And since I didn’t have to contact so many people, I could spend more time with the few people that really wanted to talk. I could better understand their problems, I could help them learn different things they might consider. I understood them, they understood me, we built trust and confidence with each other.

And they introduced me to others they worked with. They invited me to their project meetings, they asked for my experience or to introduce them to others who had faced similar challenges. Since I had lots of experience in the problems they were trying to solve, they engaged me deeply. I helped them understand what was important and what they could ignore. I helped build their confidence and helped them manage their way through their project much more effectively and efficiently.

I found these conversations fascinating and rewarding. I was building my experience and knowledge, I was building deep trust with people. It was rewarding to see them succeed. And inevitably, they would also say, “Dave, I know someone…… let me introduce you….”

I found myself achieving much more, without working nearly as hard. And the work I was doing was far more interesting.

I no longer looked at 1000s of outreaches and 100s of calls a day. I could focus more deeply on a smaller number of people who actually wanted to talk to me, not avoid me. I found I was winning a majority of the deals I talked to them about (today over 87%). The number of “No Decision Made,” plummeted. The majority of people I worked with succeeded in their change efforts.

Then I saw, the time they took do reach a decision started to reduce–reducing by 30-40% over what it had taken before. I realized, I was helping them navigate the buying process far more effectively and efficiently.

All this appealed to my laziness. To make my goals, I had to do far less work. I could focus more deeply on far fewer people, and achieve my goals. And the relationships I built with those people led to introductions and more relationships and more opportunities.

I’m confused when I look at the majority of sellers. They work awfully hard! They have unbelievable numbers of activities they have to execute. And with all this hard work, their rate of failure is high!

I admire their hard work and diligence. But I just can’t do it.

I think I’ll continue my lazy approach. It seems to be working, and it’s a hell of a lot more fun and rewarding!