Steve Jobs was lauded as an entrepreneur and marketer, but you could make the case that he was a master salesperson. At the age of 12, he called up Bill Hewlett (the “H” in “HP”). Jobs needed a part and figured why not start at the top. Bill answered, gave him the part as well as a summer job.
“Most people never pick up the phone. Most people never call and ask. And that’s what separates the people who do things from those who just dream about them."
- Steve Jobs
I know I shared another of his quotes in my previous post, but I swear I do not have a Steve Jobs fetish. After seeing this story earlier in the week though, I would be remiss in not sharing it because it speaks to so much of what separates those that choose sales as a career. We come for the action.
Without that interaction (Steve calling the founder of HP), Apple may not have existed or been what it is today. It is hard to say for certain since Steve had a tenacious drive and zeal about him. Most likely he would have succeeded doing anything he set his mind to. Why? Because he had a bias for action.
When I was at Siebel Systems, one of the core values that was formalized during my tenure was “Bias for Action”. This means that we prioritized action and took ownership instead of passing the buck, making excuses, or over-analyzing.
This term “bias for action” is something you may hear often in different forms in the core values or guiding principles in many companies. As an example, it is famously part of Amazon's leadership principles that guides everything they do as an organization. In other companies, you may hear it phrased as “getting things done” or “making things happen”.
At the moment, there is a lot of over-analyzing going on. With a pandemic and protests, our normal playbooks have been ripped to shreds. The basic motions of sales are jammed up, as prospecting to closing has become significantly harder. This makes pipeline reviews and forecasts a crap shoot. In turn, this gets executives nervous about costs and more willing to pull the trigger on layoffs.
I have spoken in the past about sellers over-indexing on activity and under-indexing on thinking. You need a balance of both. Without a sound strategy, your activity is a waste. Without action, you have no revenue. Eventually you need to send that email, make that cold call, and make stuff happen.
Over the past several weeks, I have been sharing a framework to help you think through the strategy for selling during the pandemic. Hopefully you are now putting that into action and measuring results. Through those results, you are seeing problems in your process and adjusting your messaging, targeting, and cadences to course correct.
Selling is not just about sales however. You see with salespeople that never evolved their techniques or adjusted to different markets. For example, an SMB seller now reaching out to Enterprise companies or a person in retail now selling B2B products. You also have to have bias for learning and expanding your field of experiences.
To be seen as a valuable and insightful resource to prospects, you need to be interesting. As I shared in my post, this requires having well-formed, defendable opinions. If you are not learning about your industry, your customers, your products and your market, how are you going to have anything meaningful to share?
It is not just always be closing. You now need to always be learning. Without the learning, there is no closing. To that end, we are working on partnering with Winning By Design on workshops to help the sales professionals in our community that want to level up their skills. But we don’t want to do this in a vacuum, so please go to this one-minute survey to let us know the workshops topics that would be most helpful and interesting to you.
Lastly, as the founder of the Enterprise Sales Forum, I want to voice our community’s support for ending racism and racial bias that has created an unfair and unequal environment for underrepresented groups, especially for the black community. And today is an especially important day for our black colleagues, a day that has significant cultural and historical meaning.
Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation or Freedom Day, is a holiday on June 19th to observe the end of slavery in the United States. It is a day that we as a nation can celebrate the rich tapestry of Black culture, history and community in America.
Why Juneteeth? On June 19, 1865, two years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, General Granger of the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce the end of the war and of slavery. Juneteenth is now an official holiday across many states and companies, and has taken on even greater significance these past few weeks and the renewed conversation for racial justice.
Juneteenth is a day for everyone to honor the progress we’ve made as a country in providing life, liberty, and freedom to all. We should also reflect there is still much further to go in order to ensure a just and fair world exists for all peoples no matter our backgrounds.
The Enterprise Sales Forum leadership team humbly asks our community to reach out to your black colleagues, listen to their concerns, and be an ally in addressing the biases in the workplace. May we all seek to be more inclusive, welcoming, and understanding with each other!
The Enterprise Sales Forum is a professional community championing the practice of sales through monthly sales talks at chapters globally. Our chapters provide an open, collaborative and diverse environment to share new ideas, network and learn actionable insights for professional sales development.