Stop Looking For The Magic Bullet
- Dan Greenberg
- May 22, 2024
- 4 min read
The question is not, “What is the secret to sales?” The question is, “What is the secret to this sale, for my selling style, at this moment, with this client?”
People who write instructional books don’t often change their ways when they read the instruction of others. What is my point in telling you this? The point is that some people are in the right place at the right time and some are not. Some are smart, and some are not. Some work hard and some do not. Skill, intelligence, and hard work give you more opportunities to be successful, but they don’t correlate perfectly, or even all that well with success, for the most part.
Generally, when we see successful people, all it means is that they found success earlier in life, and were therefore able to build off of that success and create more compound success. I don’t want to take anything away from any successful person, because much of success involves putting yourself in the right place at the right time, using skill, knowledge, and a lot of hard work. It also takes, in the words of Chet
Holmes, successful sales executive, and author of The Ultimate Sales Machine, “pig-headed discipline” in order to position yourself for success and learn the necessary skills.
But that does not mean that all of those who are successful have skill and work hard, and it does not mean that all of those who are less successful lack skill and don’t work hard.
It is worth it to contemplate the idea that those who find success early often do it in their own way, very independently, which reinforces for them the idea that they do not need advice from others. Then they cash in on that early success, some of them eschewing innovation and development going forward in favor of what worked in the past.
On the other hand, those who build more slowly to their success often find a patchwork of information and individuals to help with the journey. They combine information from different sources and people and situations to help in their journey. This improves diversity of information, and helps develop more learning paths and skill sets rather than focusing on single source information. Take mentors for example. What is a mentor anyway? A mentor is a concentration of information; a single source. This is not to speak negatively about mentors in any way whatsoever, great mentor relationships can be incredibly beneficial for both parties. But a concentration of information means that you are only getting one point of view. It is important to diversify viewpoints across people, materials, and situations.
All of this is to say that you shouldn’t take any set of information as gospel. Glean what you can from it and then seek additional points of view. This goes for experts as well, because, as mentioned above, many had early successes and have traded off the currency of that success, so their perspectives tend to be limited.
Throughout the various articles that I post, I work hard to provide a unique perspective; the perspective that explores what your behaviors cause the buyer to think, and what buyer behaviors should influence you to do. But there are, of course, other perspectives. Other ways to think about sales cycles, and other ways to take in information.
What you decide to focus on in your learning journey is very important. But if you try to take in too much, you will likely end up with nothing. We don’t have the ability, as humans, to change our behavior drastically, and over multiple areas of focus. This means incorporating knowledge from diverse sources into your development, but then synthesising small pieces of that information, and integrating very specific motions into your behavior in small doses.
Becoming a … master is not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times. — Chet Holmes
As you progress and develop skills as a seller and as a business leader, it is important to think systematically about how you want to implement your learnings into your day-to-day behaviors. The key is to take things one at a time. If you try to adjust a lot of behavior at once, your brain will not be able to handle all of the change and it will revert back to what you are comfortable with. Assuming you are looking to improve, the things you are comfortable with are exactly the things that you did before embarking on your improvement journey.
Pick one area, one skill, one behavior, and build a way of thinking around that area that helps you key in on and concentrate on situations that are developing in a way that will call that skill into action. Focus that improvement area around a sales situation you find yourself in often, and then position it in a way that suits your selling style, your clients, and the types of settings that you come across. Then train yourself to go through the mental steps necessary to change the behavior and commit those mental steps and behavioral changes to your memory and to your action plan.
No one improves at anything overnight. Finish a behavior modification to a level that you feel satisfied with, and then work on another. No matter how much pressure you are under to perform now, imagine being at the same level of output 5 years from now, and what that pressure might look like. Allow yourself the time to improve at a rate that is conducive to actual long term improvement and your future self will thank you.
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