Operating In A World Unfriendly To Our Kind
- Dan Greenberg
- Mar 6
- 6 min read
My family is a big poker playing family, so I heard this statement a lot growing up, “Anyone can read their own hand; being good at poker is being able to read the other players’ hand”. In other words, it’s nice to have a plan, but it means nothing if the situation or the person you are dealing with changes or behaves differently than you expect them to. I was talking to a friend who is in a new sales role for the first time in her life, and she told me that she met a potential client who she was friendly with at a bar and had a great conversation with him about what she wanted to sell him. She went on to tell me that she is just going to take all of her meetings at bars. I told her, “that’s great” because it is great, but there is a “but” there. She obviously “clicked” with this guy who she is friendly with, and when we “click” with someone it is easy to develop a relationship. However, If we think about it logically, each individual will generally click with some people and not with others. So, while this approach may get you some deals, it won’t help you with other deals, and more importantly, it won’t make you any better at your job than the next salesperson who is selling a competitive product. The bottom line is that in order to be a good seller, it is vital to learn to interact in situations we are not comfortable and with people we don’t click with.
First, let’s talk about the people. As humans, we tend to gravitate towards those we click with, and sellers are no different. We should leverage those good relationships to our mutual benefit with the buyer, both socially, and commercially. But, part of becoming a great seller is learning to sell to everyone and in every situation. Your perceptiveness, and attention paid to the behaviors of your buyer is what will allow you to identify their comfort levels with certain lines of conversation, and their levels of affinity for different styles of engagement. That attention, and perceptiveness will help you to understand when to be a Gitomer, which means focusing on the positives; the vision and hope of the buyer, and when to be an Orlob, which means focusing on the buyers pain (see “Pain & Hope: The Essence of Great Selling, my post from October 24th, 2024 if you want to learn more about Gitomer and Orlob). Of course, those aren’t the only two ways, but the work doesn’t end when you learn the different strategies, it continues as you work to understand who you are talking to so that you know when to leverage each.
We all know sales managers who just tell us that it’s about volume, it’s a numbers game. They are right to a certain extent, because if you talk to enough people, you are bound to click with some of them. But if you are only making deals with those you click with off the bat, you will not get more efficient; you will not get better unless you change something. We also all know managers who had some success as sellers, and then try to teach their team in every situation to do everything exactly the same way they did it. Problem is, it’s a different time, an evolving product, a different person, a different relationship, and perhaps most importantly, you are a different seller. So it might work here and there, but that’s not because that manager is improving you as a seller, the manager just figured out a formula that works for a certain type of situation.
So, you are left hoping that every buyer is the right personality type for the exact formula you were taught.
There is only one method that works with every type of buyer. You have to ask the right questions at the right times and know how to listen to the verbal answers, and observe the non-verbal cues of the buyer in a way that helps you understand where to take the conversation next.
You have to have enough business savvy to know how to solve for their answers to those questions, which will inherently encompass their problem. At least they will if you’ve asked the right question at the right time. If you can’t do that, you aren’t getting more efficient, you aren’t getting better, you are just making deals circumstantially, either due to outside circumstances, or due to the circumstances of the personality of the buyer you are selling to at the moment.
Now let’s talk about the situations. Even beyond the circumstances of the personalities that we, as sellers deal with, the circumstances of the world of selling are often at odds with the way in which we want to operate.
Most people are inclined to stick with the status quo, and a seller’s job is to drive change, most people want to take their time with big decisions, and a seller’s job is to drive urgency. Most people want to develop a routine and adhere to it, and a seller’s job is to disrupt. Sellers are constantly running up against social constructs that make sense for everyone else around them, but not for the sellers themselves.
This is why people inherently feel uncomfortable with sales, and when asked about being a sales professional, so many people say things like, “oh, I could never see myself doing that”.
So how should we think about dealing with people we don’t click with and situations that are not suited for our goals?
It is so important for sellers to find a balance between the incentives and drives that will make the sales organization and the seller successful, and the realities and human nature of the buyer. This means that sellers must always be operating to satisfy two different realities at any given time. That is stressful, but it is eminently doable.
Sellers must be patient and impatient all at once. This means that sellers must be quick to respond, quick to schedule, quick to plan, and quick to act. They cannot have any patients for procrastination and action on their part, but they have to display a reasonable amount of patience when it comes to client activity. For clients, the deal is not likely as high a priority as it is for the seller, but more importantly than that, the client has an entire buying organization that they have to work with to get things done, and any form of working with internal teams expends political capital. So, sellers cannot lose control and allow buyers to unnecessarily delay, but they must display patience and grace, and understand the buying organization and its potential delays.
In the same way, sellers control their actions, but not the ultimate results, so making cold calls and taking action is something that sellers have to be impatient with themselves about, but getting deals closed is something that sellers should be patient with themselves about because they don’t control the final outcome. To sum it up, sellers must be impatient when it comes to expectations of action, and patient when it comes to expectations of results.
Sellers must have a routine, and be flexible all at once. Strength in life is rarely about conviction, it is about setting boundaries, and a framework for yourself and following through with the right actions when conviction wanes. In other words, it’s easy to have convictions, and commitments wane over time, but it’s the framework, and the boundaries that you put in place that allow you to continue doing the right things and being successful. Similarly, with clients, they are not in your routine, so, while it is of maximal importance to have a routine in order to make sure you do the things you need to do, you also must be willing to be flexible to meet clients needs without losing focus on the things that need to be done. To sum it up, sellers must have a routine to fall back on over time, but flexibility in the moment.
How you balance competing interests is a major factor in how successful you will be as a seller. There are two ways to erode the possibility of making a deal. If it is clear that your interests are more important than the buyer’s, then buyers will not trust you and will not want to interact with you. On the other hand, If it is clear that the buyer’s interests are more important, buyer’s won’t respect you and they will become trained to devalue you and, by extension, your products. When there is an understanding that you, as a seller, have value, the buyer, as a person, has value, your products have value, and the buyer’s money has value, and all of those levels of value are similar, that is when deals get done.
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