I Have A Love / Hate Relationship With Sales…But Not For The Reasons You Might Think
- Dan Greenberg
- Feb 22, 2024
- 6 min read
Let’s start with the “hate” side first and get it out of the way.
Sales and sales adjacent roles can be frustrating. Sellers can be mired in uncertainty and reliance on others. They are constantly judged by numbers to the exclusion of all else. They have their comp plans changed at the whim of management. And, the expectations are relentless; every month or quarter brings new and aggressive goals and the ever-present question from leadership, “what have you done for me lately”? In fairness, you probably understood the “hate” side intuitively. It’s not hard to find people who are not in sales who profess their never-ending commitment to never end up in sales. More to the point, it is not hard to find salespeople who spend the majority of their time worrying and complaining about the things that make their job so tough. There are myriads of social media accounts with millions of followers just churning out memes and comments about how frustrating sales is.
The “love” part may be a bit less obvious.
Sales is a competitive endeavor that invites those who want to work hard and develop skills to learn incredible amounts. It allows you to make a lot of money without spending years in school learning a specific trade or technical skill set. It allows you to get ahead in the business world, and gain influence throughout your career.
But I want to go a bit deeper and talk about the things that sales can teach a person that go beyond corporate success. Improving persuasion skills and behaviors not only makes you better at sales, it can make you better at life. I don’t only mean better at life, as in, more likely to get your way, although that may be true. I mean that the attunement, and perceptiveness that good sellers learn can make you a better person. This is a pretty lofty claim, but it is worth considering. Quite simply put, sales has taught me to be a better person.
Active Listening:
Sales, and development of sales skills has made me a better listener. I started as a pretty bad listener, and I am still not great, but active listening is a skill that must be nurtured and developed. Human beings cannot actually multitask in the sense that our active brain is always only focused on one thing, so if we are trying to listen to a person talk, and we are simultaneously doing something else or thinking about something else, we will not take in the information that person is conveying. Sales encompasses a consistent set of social and business interactions that, taken together, can help complete a puzzle explaining what the client really needs and wants. These social and business interactions are shrouded in political opaqueness, self-interested modification and curation of information, and posturing and power dynamics that distort and hide what is important. Any of the important signals that a seller needs to pick up on can be missed if the seller is distracted even in the slightest. It is so easy to get distracted by other screens and devices, and even just by other thoughts. Training yourself to actively listen is a sales behavior that is unparalleled in importance but can be so beneficial to so many other parts of a person’s life.
Empathy:
Sales learning and training has also undoubtedly made me a more empathetic person, who is more able to understand the perspectives of others. We often find sellers who talk about how a client of theirs is “an idiot” or “incompetent”, or a “jerk” or any one of a number of other reasons why the deal may not be moving forward. Although there are clients out there who are idiots, and incompetents, and jerks, the most common reason why a deal is stalled, or stalling, is that incentives are not aligned. While it is certainly fun, and healthy sometimes, to joke about the deficiencies of clients, sellers who think about client incentives will be systematically more successful at closing deals than those who blame stumbling blocks on the clients themselves. This idea does not only go for sales, it goes for almost any encounter in life, and proactively cultivating a greater ability to default to understanding perspectives instead of blaming the other side is a life skill much more so than a sales skill.
Balance:
In sales, you can close a massive deal on September 30th that makes your quarter, and you can subsequently endure 2 months of mishaps and unforeseen complications that make your next quarter’s goal feel unattainable. That feeling of elation and pride at the end of the past quarter can change into hopelessness, and frustration so quickly. Others experience these highs and lows in a more muted way, but sellers live and die by them, metaphorically, of course, because they are judged and compensated almost completely based on numbers. The experience that a seller gains from going through this tumultuous existence is incredibly educational. Spending a lot of time celebrating a win and replaying it over and over in your head, while assuming that you were completely responsible for it and that you can repeat it almost at will, will only serve to distract you from the mundane tasks that are required to get the next win. Similarly, brooding and feeling sorry for yourself after a loss or dry spell, and constantly thinking about all of the ‘what if’s that could have changed it, while assuming that uncontrollable external factors doomed the deal, will only serve to give off an air of desperation and prevent you from focusing on the next win. Sellers who deal with the constant ups and downs of sales are better able to be balanced emotionally and intellectually so that they can focus on the next task at hand. This is a very important life skill, not just a sales skill.
Follow Through:
Follow through is sorely missing in so many of our business and social interactions. This is so much so that we needed to invent a new term, “ghosting”, to describe the proliferation of people who could not even follow through enough to notify the other human being that they, in fact, would not be following through. In addition to follow through being important to the moral fabric of our society, sales processes have a certain level of momentum to them. If a deal sits in a holding pattern for long enough, it will become stale. This is because the buyer will develop an expectation that the deal will not close. This will lead them to justify the lack of need for the solution, and likely to develop contingencies that replace the solution. As sellers experience deal cycles and start to recognize patterns where deals that sit dormant almost never close, they develop stronger follow up impulses and skills, which in turn, are good for social interactions.
The business and the function of sales is to make money, but what you take away from it as a person, and how it improves other aspects of your life is what I love about sales.
Gordon Gekko was a little bit right, but mostly wrong, when he said, “Greed is good”. Greed is good only in so much as it is a measurable constant that we can use to understand motivation. But it must be balanced by something. Greed and personal incentives are an undeniable, and ever-present part of our world, but must be balanced by individual choices. Selfish incentives are understandable, and they give us a framework in which to make decisions and set rules. The rules are there to protect against those who would take advantage of others, and to define the boundaries of socially acceptable conduct. They are not there to define each individual’s moral feelings and guidelines.
Why am I suddenly getting all philosophical? It is not because I am turning this into a philosophy or morality blog. We often find that people tend to create a dichotomy between moral behavior and smart business decisions. They pit the two against each other, but this is a false dichotomy. The skills and impulses that we look to develop as sellers make us more attentive and perceptive. They make us better listeners. They make us better teachers. And, they make us better able to understand people sitting across the table from us.
I am not looking through rose-colored glasses when I tell you that making money and treating people the right way don’t have to butt heads. Each person has to define their own moral guidelines and decide what is acceptable for them and what is not. But well within the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior is a wide array of skills, strategies, and actions that can be taken to optimize sales success and pursue opportunity and money. The best sellers establish relationships based on respect, and don’t spend time trying to employ less than reputable tactics to close deals that are not meant to be. Those deals are a waste of their time because there are always other, better deals out there, that don’t call for lies and deception. The business and the function of sales is to make money, but how you treat the people you interact with is truly important.
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