What the Fish Doesn’t Know

A fish in a pond knows a lot about its pond. It knows where to find insects to eat, and where to hide when a bigger fish swims by. It knows where to find cool shade in the afternoon, and it knows when it’s time to migrate somewhere else. It understands the way the environment directly impacts it.

But it doesn’t understand the environment itself.

It doesn’t know that the insects it eats depend on the flowers of the plants they pollinate, and it doesn’t know which plants keep the water clean, or where the water comes from in the first place. And when the environment changes, it doesn’t usually know why. If the water is muddy, it doesn’t understand upstream erosion. If insect populations decline, it doesn’t know why, it knows only that it’s hungry.

Your Buyers are Swimming in an Environment They Only Partially Understand

In complex sales, we often think that buyers know what they want, and are simply seeking a best fit solution. In fact, buyers often think this about themselves. They task a junior employee with drawing up a spreadsheet to compare vendors, and then hope whichever solution checks the most boxes will solve their problems.

The salesperson who plays along with the buyer’s spreadsheet is a bit like a conservationist selling bottled water to a fish swimming in a polluted pond. No matter how much bottled water you pour into the reservoir, if you haven’t addressed the systemic problems, you haven’t actually solved anything.

If you assume that B2B buyers know what they want, you may end up selling bottled water to a fish swimming in a polluted pond.

In complex sales, a salesperson’s first job is to help the buyer understand their own pond. Each stakeholder within the company usually knows how to do their own job. Depending on their level of responsibility, they may also understand the jobs that others do and many of the systems on which they rely.

But they rarely know everything they need to know in order to make a good purchasing decision.

They Need a Map of Relevant Systems and Relationships

A buyer in a complex sales environment may have a checklist of what they think they need, just like a fish may understand it needs clean water. But before the software buyer can make a good decision, they first need to know a great deal about how their company operates.

Too often, salespeople think they’re looking for “the decision-maker” in order to make a sale, when in fact the “decision-maker” is an interconnected web of people with different perspectives, roles, and relationships to the problem. The salesperson’s job is not to convince one person to buy a product, it’s to help that one person begin to understand the complex web of systems, relationships, and perspectives that impact the decision.

A Struggling Fish Doesn’t Always Know What It Needs

Imagine a fish living in a pond that is clogged with invasive plants, while silt from erosion upstream muddies the water. It can’t breathe like it used to, and the food it relies on is scarce. It doesn’t know that invasive plants have crowded out the plants that feed the pollinators that the fish eats. It just knows it’s in trouble.

Now imagine that you are a human who wants to improve life for the fish. If you ask the fish what they want, they might say, “I need clean water” or “I need more food.” A transactional salesperson might hear that and think the fish needs to order bottled water and cans of dried meal worms.

But a conservationist knows that what it really needs is someone to clear out the weeds, plant a riparian buffer upstream to absorb the silt from erosion, and for native plants to be returned to feed the insects that feed the fish.

A transactional salesperson would try to sell the fish a bottle of water. A decision-making catalyst helps the fish understand the systems it swims in, so it can buy what it really needs, which is a healthy, functioning organizational ecosystem.

Lack of Understanding Is The Salesperson’s Biggest Enemy

It’s often said that a “no decision” or status quo is every salesperson’s biggest competitor. But “no decision” almost always results from a lack of understanding. When the buyer doesn’t know how many stakeholders will be impacted by the decision, or what company-wide initiatives are relevant to it, or why the purchase might matter to someone higher up the “food chain,” they will struggle to get the company on board for a decision. Add to this the potential risk of losing social status or even one’s job if a mistake is made.

Then, usually, the seemingly safest and most reasonable choice is to just… not do anything at all.

A salesperson who understands that they must be a decision-making catalyst engages with the buyer to map the terrain together. They discover who else needs to be involved, what other systems will be impacted by the decision, and what perspectives need to be taken into account. Then, the salesperson can facilitate stakeholders in developing a shared mental model of the current situation, the desired state, the gap between them, and the map for getting there.

Understanding the environment also means that the problem can be tied to a company’s highest priorities, and the risk of not acting can be quantified. Once everyone shares an understanding, then and only then, a decision will be made.

Only when this shared understanding emerges can the fish be sure of how to get to clear water.