Shift Your Perspective, Change Your Sales Landscape

If you’ve been following me for long, you know I’m a student of systems thinking. I’ve been taking a training with Cabrera Lab, the think tank run by Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera of Cornell University. As I’m going deeper with their systems thinking framework called DSRP, I can’t help but notice all the ways their model can help us sell better.

This week, I want to share with you how the “P” (for perspective) part of the model can help us change our sales landscapes.

What Is DSRP?

First, a quick refresher. DSRP is a framework for thinking about (systems) thinking (I can hear Derek saying, “It’s not a framework, it’s how we think.” :). DSRP stands for Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives. Distinctions refers to the fact that every part of a system has characteristics (an identity) that make it different from the others. Systems refers to the fact that every part is part of a larger whole and contains smaller parts. Relations refers to the fact that systems and parts can relate to and interact with each other (action/reaction). And perspectives mean that you can view or think about anything from many different points of view.
It’s the P of DSRP, perspectives, that I want to talk about today.

Shift Your Perspective, Shift Your Landscape

On the news the other day, I heard about an American sheep farmer renting his land to a fracking company. To the farmer, this is a simple and elegant solution to a financial problem. Sheep farming is not highly profitable, and the fracking company pays good money to lease the land. Fracking happens underground and doesn’t appear to have any effect on the sheep, who drink water from the local well. From the farmer’s perspective, fracking is a great deal, bringing in money without causing any noticeable impact or creating extra work.

This is an example of a person viewing a system from a personal financial perspective. From this perspective, the problem is very simple: Sign the lease, collect money, and nothing else changes.

However, a shift in perspective yields a very different view. If you view fracking from the underground perspective, for instance, you can see that it is breaking up rocks that are the foundation of the landscape, and thus has the potential to destabilize the ground and release chemicals and minerals that can have long-tail consequences that make the land unsuitable for farming in the future. And when all the fracking is complete, the money goes away, leaving damaged soil and landscapes in its wake.

Or, if you view fracking from the perspective of a tourist who comes to the countryside for the views, another picture emerges. Now fracking is an eyesore, turning what was once a rolling, green landscape into a blighted landscape of drills and storage facilities.

This exemplifies how any system can be viewed from multiple perspectives. From this, you can see how, by shifting the point of view through which you observe a situation, you can uncover potential problems and open conversations that can lead to solutions.

Shifting The Sales Landscape

When we apply the “P” in DSRP to sales, we can quickly uncover one of the major problems that salespeople encounter: failing to see things through the customer’s perspective.

All too often, salespeople see a sale from their own perspective only, or through the perspective of a made-up “ideal” customer profile. They see the sales quota they need to meet and how this sale will make it possible to meet that number. If they think of it from the customer’s point of view, it’s often only through the product training that they’ve received, assuming that the features they were trained on are important to the customer. This leads to over-focusing on product features, which rarely leads to high effectiveness in a B2B sales environment.

Shift the point of view to uncover potential problems and open conversations that lead to solutions.

Now, consider a salesperson who has trained in perspectives. This salesperson knows that no problem or solution has only one point of view. By shifting their perspective to that of the customer, they can begin to understand what might be in the way of a decision, and what would help it to go forward.

In complex sales, this ability to shift perspectives is especially important, because there are more stakeholders, and each stakeholder views the potential purchase from a different perspective.

The person researching solutions is looking at the purchase as an organizational task. They want to create a spreadsheet that they can share with their stakeholders to demonstrate which potential solutions are a good fit. They’re looking to check boxes. Beyond that, they want to make their boss happy. A salesperson who understands this perspective can help the researcher shift into an exploratory mode and open up to new options that will be more beneficial to them from multiple perspectives.

The CEO of the company may have another perspective entirely. They are responsible for the health of the full company, and they will be looking at the sale through the lens of whether it will contribute meaningfully to the success of the organization.

An HR director may be thinking about whether the purchase will help or hinder their efforts to drive team cohesion and take care of the company’s employees.

Every stakeholder in every situation will have a unique perspective on the decision-making process. The salesperson who can uncover these perspectives, get stakeholders aligned, and position the offering based on a more consolidated view is at an advantage in the situation. They can navigate conversations to address what matters to the other people. This kind of reframing can change the course of the entire decision-making process (and hence the sales cycle.)

One common customer perspective that salespeople often miss is the resistance to change and the perceived risks involved. Most people don’t like change, nor do they like taking risks, such as getting fired if they make a foolish investment decision. As a salesperson, you may be seeing the situation from the perspective of everything your product can do for the stakeholder. But the stakeholder has another perspective: Every feature you show them represents another change they will have to make in the way they work.

The salesperson who understands this perspective can help the customer to navigate their own change process, and that of the others inside their organization.

I love the way DSRP helps me think about sales and other aspects of life. There are so many situations where the ability to shift our perspective and see matters from another point of view can help us find solutions. Where can you shift your perspective and find new solutions?