The Truth about S****(Why "Sales" Doesn't have to be a Bad Word)
SALES!
Be honest, did your eye twitch a little reading that word?
SALES!
What about now? How are your eyebrows holding up?
I have spent the last 11 years working in and around some facet of B2B sales, yet until recently I would have never confessed that I enjoy selling.
"Hi, my name is Alyssa and I enjoy selling."
Several months ago I wrote about the differences between business development and sales because I think people not only confuse the two but are often uncomfortable using the word SALES and therefore try to put it in a more approachable BD outfit.
Today I want to make a case for why you should forget everything you've ever felt about sales, salespeople, and selling and to stop dressing the term down!
Selling = Problem Solving | Problem Solving = Selling
If you've spent any time in the growth world, you've surely come across Dan Pink's "To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others."
In this book, Dan suggests that "to sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources – not to deprive that person, but to leave him/her better off in the end ... this is what it means to serve: improving another's life, and in turn, improving the world."
What Dan is saying is that selling - for the right reasons - is a form of problem-solving. He even suggests that selling is a form of management consulting, as it creates a path to help the person sitting across from you solve a problem or create an opportunity.
Don't Drink the Kool-Aid
I've heard people say, "I can sell anything as long as I believe in it" and, while I love the enthusiasm, I think this logic is flawed.
More important than BELIEF is having a very clear and unbiased view of what you (or your product) do well and what you don't do well. The most helpful salespeople [read: problem solvers] are the ones who can tell you why their offering ISN'T right for you. My current CEO often talks about a mentor of hers who is known for talking people OUT of working with him, a genuine approach, which has come back tenfold over the years because of the inherent trust that is built.
Selling is NOT an Individual Sport
Growing up as a figure skater, I'll admit that all my athletic endeavors started and ended with me. The result always came down to the work I put in, my competitive mentality, and the way that I showed up on competition day.
My hypothesis is that many organizations set salespeople up to operate in a similar fashion - as independent athletes. If YOU sell, then YOU get paid. As a result (or perhaps the chicken and the egg is reversed here), the stereotypical salesperson tends to have a very high achieving, competitive, independent mindset.
My view is that organizations are leaving a lot of the table by operating this way - both financially and culturally.
“What if we all started to think about selling as a team sport?”
Why? Because it's really a shame for organizations to draw a hard line between executors who don't have access to sales strategy and sales leaders who don't fully understand the level of effort needed to create the result [read: people selling the work vs. people doing the work].
Relationship building isn't for everyone, selling isn't for everyone, [insert the execution/implementation components of your industry] isn't for everyone, but there should be healthy respect designed in and around your sales leaders for the way they put themselves out there every day. Just like a sports team, each athlete brings a different set of skills to the game and finds their niche to maximize contribution ... but at the end of the game, no single individual won or lost on their own.
Selling becomes a lot more meaningful and effective when you have the right motives in place and the right team members working together to achieve results.
If you're interested in learning more about some of the concepts mentioned here, I highly recommend Northwestern Kellogg's School of Management's Mastering Sales: A Toolkit for Success Program!
Happy problem-solving, team!
