And so it begins…
“It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing your whole life.”
Moneyball is brilliant. I’m obsessed with it. Still. Both Michael Lewis’s book and Bennett Miller’s film. That said, outside of being at Wrigley Field, I’m not even a huge baseball fan. What I’m really a fan of is progress, and I admire the way a legacy sport with centuries-old rules can be improved to become both more competitive and more inclusive of different kinds of talent, rather than merely disrupted (to borrow and gently impugn a clichéd tech bro favorite).
I love selling. With every fiber of my being. Regardless of the specific leadership, sales, marketing, or consulting roles I’ve had over the past 25 years, when the drop-down menu needs to be checked, the occupation blank needs to be filled-in on my tax return, or I need to tell someone what I do at a cocktail party, I say I’m in sales. Proudly. It’s enabled me to travel the world, meet bright, interesting people, and help pay for the salaries of people I work with and care about. I even met my wife through work, so I can even thank sales for my family - who are the best people I know.
I also love salespeople. I know all the stereotypes and knocks against them, and I’m still good. They’re my people. By and large, salespeople are driven, hard-working, no bullshit professionals. They care about each other and are entrepreneurial in a way that many in business are not. Unfortunately, they’re just not always set up for success or treated fairly, almost always unintentionally. I know this from being a sales rep and a sales leader multiple times. I’ve been on both sides of the conversation. I’ve been sent home when the numbers weren’t great. And worse yet, I’ve done the same thing to other people.
The business of sales (be it business development, client services, account leadership, or whatever you call it in your organization) must evolve. Too often, sales performance becomes a referendum on the individual instead of how I believe it should be viewed: as a measure of strategy execution, with the business owning the outcome as much as the individual. Rarely is that the case within organizations, where salespeople bear a disproportionate degree of risk without the benefit of real-time feedback distilled from their actual client interactions. As a result, individual sales performance becomes an inefficient act of self-governance with success measured solely by the outcome: the win or the loss. 1 or 0. Binary. Not only does this fail to tell the whole story, it actively obscures it. No wonder individual client successes are so difficult to replicate and scale, onboarding salespeople is such a tenuous proposition, and the effects of sales, even in success, never feel cumulative.
This creates plenty of headaches for leadership teams, especially their sales leaders, who I have great empathy for. Too often, they can find themselves coping by emphasizing control, becoming over-tethered to rigid beliefs or methodologies, or getting co-opted into the losing game of negative reinforcement. Unfortunately, this prevents them from making the sales organization the focal point for a level of truth-seeking, continuous learning, and information sharing that fuels sustainable growth while helping the business adapt and move faster.
All this to say, I’m convinced there’s a better way and that a tremendous opportunity exists for sales-driven businesses to become more sophisticated users of specialized customer insights the way most marketing-driven businesses are. The black box of what happens in client interactions is priceless, and it’s time to open it up.
That’s why I’m doing this. I’m committed to helping our clients make the way they run the business of sales more sophisticated, more caring, more fun, and far more productive for all parties concerned.
I’m happy to be in sales.
