The Deal Closer's Paradox

The landscape of the business world has fundamentally changed, and it has changed because the way we interact with one another socially has changed. Sure, technology has had a big impact on this, but fundamentally, the difference is social and relational.

Two main changes have fundamentally reshaped how buyers and sellers interact. Buyers’ needs have shifted; what they require from sellers is now less urgent and more ambiguous. That has caused the demands of the seller in the sales cycle to change significantly. Let’s take a look at the two most vivid changes:

1. Information availability: It may seem like this is an old story, after all, the internet has been in heavy use for 30 years, but a new generation of decision makers has only somewhat recently fully integrated digital information usage into the core of how business is done and decisions are made. This means that buyers no longer need sellers for the information they have and often know more than a seller can convey in an email, a one sheet, or slides long before the selling organization even knows they are a prospect. This makes buyers less needy, and less amenable to the sellers timeline and needs.

   
   

2. Lower switching costs: The proliferation of pay-to-play models, easy integrations, modularized packaging, specialized and niche solutions, and the generally lower tolerance for long term risk has created a world where buyers seek out the skinniest and lowest cost version of most solutions. This means that they don’t want to develop long term relationships with vendors because they want to feel free to switch at any time. They don’t want to treat sellers as consultants because they don’t value the development of that long term relationship, and they actively seek out alternatives at all times making their needs less obvious and less urgent. This makes buyers less cooperative, and more deliberate choosing long term partners.

These two stark reality changes, as well as others, have made the job of sales harder. But companies still buy solutions, and the sales are still there to be made, the only question is, can you be influential in that decision making process.

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The changing landscape has made the shape and trajectory of the sales cycle unrecognizable to sellers from 20 years ago who have not adapted, and one of the biggest changes has been the traditional understanding of the concept of closing and how that does or does not affect a deal. Sellers no longer know how to drive urgency because driving urgency has gotten much harder and sellers have not adapted new tactics.

There are managers and trainers out there who remember that one great close they had where the customer said “no”, and they just would not take no for an answer, and eventually they dramatically turned things around, or where they put pressure on the client to close right before the end of the quarter to help the team make quota. Sometimes these memories are exacerbated, and sometimes they are very real. Sometimes they happened a long time ago, before information was as readily available, and before switching accelerated, and sometimes they occurred recently and just happened to work out with a needy client being in the right place at the right time. But the key thing to realize about them is that they are not scalable. Making one deal like that is possible, making deals over and over again like that is just not a reality anymore.

The reason is because all of those tactics required pressure and driving urgency, but in the new landscape of information availability and easy switching those tactics are ineffective because buyers don’t need sellers to purchase a solution, they only need them where there is true consultation value being offered. That can dramatically lengthen sales cycles, and introduce uncertainty and lack of control into a sales organization’s processes.

Company leaders consistently talk about their top performers as being almost mythical. These leaders glorify these one-off dramatic closes, and the salespeople who made them happen. But for the really good sellers, it took them a long time to build up to their success, even if it was the most recent close that made everyone else notice. More importantly, the skills that make great sellers great at their job have very little to do with the dramatic closes that get all the attention.

Companies put pressure on new sellers to perform in the same way as these mythical, magical closers, but it just does not work like that. Small companies looking to hire often talk about how they have one great performer and everyone else that they hire doesn’t perform as well. This is simply a margin problem. The top performer is performing well because they have built up to that point, and because when they started there was likely significantly more low hanging fruit, that the original top performer has since closed, so a new seller will rarely perform as well at the margin until they are given time, often years.

I worked at the company formerly known as Twitter for over 4 years early in my career. It was a great place to work in some ways, but it had its faults. They hired great, and intelligent people, but they suffered from a culture that I have only gained an understanding of as my career has progressed. They consistently talked about culture and mission. They talked about doing what is right for the client, and being truly consultative. They talked about not being the typical salesperson, and supporting the great things that the company is doing for the world. Of course, this was all said at company-wide and organizational meetings. But then, in 1 on 1s and small group meetings, the conversation was very different. It sounded like every other sales organization. Why is your pipeline lagging? Are you going to hit your goal this quarter? Why are your weekly call numbers so low? These questions are not bad in a vacuum, but the discontent was palpable for sellers.

Great sellers develop trust over time, and quarterly goals can have a directly negative effect on that progress. Actually, let me rephrase, it’s not the goals that are the problem, it’s the threat of dismissal for less tenured sellers if they don’t hit those goals. Goals can be arbitrary, and rarely reflect a fair understanding of what should happen. If a seller decides to take a long term approach to a book of business and has a real plan to succeed, then missing a goal in early quarters is not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, they should not get commission for deals they don’t close but internal urgency can have a direct and negative effect on long term success of sellers. The core idea here is that short term expectations often have negative effects on the long term ability of sellers to grow and become great.

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Jim Collins popularized the understanding of The Stockdale Paradox in his book, “Good to Great”, which happens to be an excellent business read, and I highly recommend it for sellers. The Paradox is also discussed in Viktor Frankl’s psychology book centered around the Holocaust, “Man’s Search For Meaning”. The Stockdale Paradox is centered around James Stockdale, a Naval Officer who was taken captive as a POW by the Viet Cong, along with a number of other soldiers, for years. I, by no means want to compare POWs to sales, as the former is about humanity and truly matters and the latter is not and does not, but still, the underlying message is enlightening.

Stockdale and the other men were kept in terrible conditions and with no access to the outside world. It was easy to lose hope, and allow yourself to go mad, which could easily be deadly in those situations. The soldiers who were pessimistic, and did not believe they would survive oftentimes did lose their minds or do things that put themselves and others at risk. On the other hand, the soldiers that were incredibly optimistic, and believed that they would be home by Thanksgiving, or by Christmas, were often bitterly disappointed when their expectations or hopes were not met, and many suffered similar fates to the pessimists.

The soldiers who fared best, and gave themselves and others the best chance to survive, and many did, were the ones who balanced optimism with realism. The way they did this was by truly believing that they would survive and get out, but never placing any time based prediction, or expectations on their belief. Optimism says, “Yes, I can get through this”, or ,“I can accomplish this”. Realism says, “There are many factors that I cannot control no matter how skilled or smart I am, and therefore I will take things one day at a time, one hour at a time, one action at a time, and just keep moving in the right direction until I get there, regardless of if I know now, when that will be”.

This type of thinking just isn’t conducive with monthly and quarterly goals. Don’t get me wrong, I get it. Goals have to exist, and sellers should not be paid variable income when they don’t produce. The trick is for sellers and managers to come together and build a long term strategy that is optimistic and realistic so that the seller understands their responsibility and the plan to fulfill it. Revenue organizations need to allow those processes to play out and support the long term growth of their organization and their sellers, and that means understanding that short term results can, and are often negatively correlated with long term success.

Sales takes skill; but it also takes discipline and control