Why are we so afraid of a ‘no’?

Why are we afraid of asking questions that we don’t know the answer to?

Would we be interested in a discipline that helps you uncover the wants and needs of another?

And would we be interested in helping design a process for vetting those wants and needs so that you could create outcomes that matter for your business, your team, and your life?

In speaking with executives who are part of an executive management team as well as their reports, I see many attempting to justify their budget. In many respects, they speak different languages (Sales, Marketing, Operations, Security, Finance, HR, etc.). The challenge for the CEO is to be the connector between the operational owners of the business to the macro goals of the company. Each operational budget then, should have a value proposition to the corporate outcomes that matter to the business.

Which has led me to be preoccupied lately with the interaction of salespeople with the buyers of products and services (who have budgets that should be aligned with the business)

Why should we care about how sales organizations train and measure their people? Because we deal with them professionally and personally for products and services that create value for our business and our life. And if we pay attention to how they have been trained and how they are measured, we will gain insights that will help us manage our own buying process.

For this conversation, I travel back in time to a manager and a company I worked for in the early 80’s. You see, I didn’t like salespeople. However, I was drawn to the coming digital transformation that was changing the business I was in and the world around me. (Yes, in the 80’s!) And, through my questions, I caught the attention of a person who had been working for the “automation” division of a large aerospace company. He was getting promoted and thought I would be outstanding in a consultative sales position.

Just a few minor problems that led me to disagree with him:

1.      I thought the pursuit of money as a sole objective in a career was dangerous.

2.      I had never sold anything before.

3.      I knew nothing about business or technology.

My contact swiftly and accurately got to the main point; I had no confidence that I could overcome these obstacles, especially my perspective on salespeople.

I spent a few years in sales before recognizing that my superpower was recognizing how purpose, vision, strategy, and process management connected to create a valuable company. But the lessons were profound. And many of them came from a collaboration with my sales manager in those younger years.

I decided to look him up and to drill down into his superpower, developing first class salespeople and managers to understand the unique perspective and behaviors of their prospects and clients. His company is M3 Learning, and his name is Skip Miller. Prolific author and passionate evangelist of sales as a professional discipline focused on the value of the people, process, and tools that contribute to the growth of a company. And he should know. He was there at an early stage with many of the now public companies in the technology sector.

Enjoy the conversation and apply some of the tools inside your unique sector and discipline.