We all know that selling is hard. It’s not just that buyers are overwhelmed, it’s not just the disruption/change everyone faces, it’s not the unpredictability we and our customers face. Just doing it right takes effort. Focus, discipline, mastery, relentless execution.
Knowing this, why do we keep looking for the shortcuts? Why do we look for the hacks, so we don’t have to put in the effort? Why do we look for AI and other tools to do this work for us? Why do we chase speed, volume, velocity over skill? Why do we prize templates, scripts, playbooks over critical thinking/helping our customers figure things out?
And chasing these shortcuts, why do we still wonder about why customers don’t respond, deals stall, opportunities vanish?
The truth is the fundamentals work!
But only if we are working them! They only work if we do the work, but somehow we seem not to want to do that hard work.
But why, instead, do we invest so much time and money into things that don’t work? Why do binge on content on writing the perfect cold open, they killer LI outreach, 10 ways to overcome every objections, AI prompts to 10X our pipelines. Why don’t we invest the time in actually doing what works?
It’s not about efficiency. It’s really about avoidance.
And avoidance can’t be mistaken with laziness or time. Even with these hacks and shortcuts, people are putting in the time. So why do we avoid doing what we know works?
Avoidance, however we mask it, never drives change.
I think what happens is what so many of us do looks like work. People are busy, their calendars are filled, they are consumed with activity. Hacks, shortcuts feel like productivity. We mistake efficiency for effectiveness. And when everyone is doing this, we believe we must be doing the right thing.
Another element is that we don’t really understand the work
We haven’t really seen or understood what “great” looks like. We’ve never studied how someone prepares for and executes a high impact meeting. We haven’t seen how they engage others in collaborative conversations building trust with each other. We may “learn the mechanics” about how to make a high impact sales call, but we haven’t actually experienced it in practice. We’ve never seen how to read the dynamics of what’s happening with our customers and how we engage them. There is a massive difference in being trained in how to do something, or having playbooks that direct everything we do and the experience we have in actually doing it, and in seeing how high performers actually do it.
Debussy is quoted as saying, “Music is the space between the notes.” We tend to focus on the “notes,” not understanding or experiencing the magic that happens in between.
Our incentives and metrics, inadvertently, reward the avoidance. We measure the activities, disconnecting them from the outcomes. We focus on metrics over meaning. In this environment, not doing the hard work becomes the rational choice.
And, perhaps diving too deeply, sometimes we may see fear masquerading as optimism.
In our fast changing worlds, both we and our customers face challenges and disruptions we may have never experienced. We simply may not know what to do or how to do it. We are, consumed by FOMU. Where the work we really need to do is to figure out how to confront these issues, experiment, fail, pick ourselves up and try again, we don’t do it. Avoidance shelters us from facing the unknown, when that’s exactly what we need to confront.
What do we do, how do we move forward?
How do we stop these avoidance behaviors (individually and organizationally)?
- Make “mastery” visible
Help people see what great performance looks like. Not through the playbooks and formulas, but in actually observing and being part of the experience. Shadow top performers, deconstruct and understand great calls/meetings. Focus on learning the dynamics of the interaction, not how they leveraged the playbook. Then practice it, get your teeth kicked in, sit down with others to dissect the experience and grow from it.
- Redesign metrics to focus on meaning, not activities
Rather than checking off the things on our list, what real progress did we make? How are we moving ourselves, our people, our customers to achieve our shared goals? To do the right work we have to produce the right outcomes.
- Create space to think and reflect–both individually and as groups
What might I have changed in that last meeting? Could I have accomplished more? Was I connecting with the customer in the most impactful way possible? What would the customer say about the impact of the meeting on them and their thinking. It’s not that we demonstrated our features, functions, capabilities in the meeting, but it’s about the meaning we create with the customers (or our people). Sit down with teams, sharing what’s happening, learning from each other.
- Normalize the fear
Selling is hard! We can’t ignore this, we can’t avoid it. How do we confront it? How do we become more comfortable with doing the uncomfortable? How do we recognize that our peers, customers, and people are experiencing the same things and start learning from each other.
Selling isn’t easy. Buying isn’t easy. They will and should never be. It’s about change, changing thinking, exploring new ideas, new ways of doing things, exploring and understanding risks. This is hard work, but we and our customers only succeed by doing that hard work.
Avoidance, however we mask it, never drives change.
