Preface: Mitch Little is a close friend and “sparring partner.” We often get into discussions and debates about the future of selling and how to drive high performance. (I guess sparring is overstated, he and I are almost always in wild agreement). Mitch should know, as Senior Vice President, Worldwide Client Engagement at Microchip, he ran one of the highest performing organizations I’ve seen. He is passionate about everything in selling and engaging customers. As a demonstration of that passion, some years ago, he wrote “Shiftability, Creating Sustainable Competitive Advantage In Selling.” Here’s Mitch’s take:
Why did I get interested in “selling” he asked? (he is Dave Brock of course). The answer is something like this….
In the beginning…. nearly 70 years ago, there was this little kid in Montana. He loved to be outside, so whenever the snow level dropped below his own height he would head out to wander and create “things” in the woods. Well, in Montana that meant that there was still a lot of time spent inside. In those days my favorite stuff to make time fly was creating things with Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets (you all may need to Google those to see what they were). Both of those sets of parts and pieces allowed you to build model scale houses, barns, tractors, cranes, hot rod cars, and a variety of creations only limited by your imagination. I would combine the two sets of magical parts and create contraptions of all kinds.
That desire to create, build, and understand how things worked continued thru my early years, my teenage years and on to my college years. With a degree in Electrical Engineering and a life long practice in Mechanical Engineering, the drive to UNDERSTAND morphed from hardware to software and finally on to the most complex field of all….PEOPLE. One day while working on a software program in the era known as “Radio Shack TRS80 days” I concluded that my time as an engineer of “stuff” needed to move along, so I joined what my father called the “dark side” of our electronics industry and went to work for a distributor of electronic components as a “sales engineer”. That was about 50 years ago. Vacuum tubes were still used in television and HI-FI audio (Google vacuum tubes too).
That deep desire to serve others by understanding them deeply was always my calling, I just needed to listen a little closer to that voice. Fixing things, is still a passion. I do that today by understanding others very deeply, because I care about helping them achieve what they wish to achieve. So my purpose today is linked to their purpose and my time is spent serving them to their benefit. You can call it selling if you like!
Mitch p.s. check out mitchlittle.com if you want to UNDERSTAND!
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