“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”
- Peter F. Drucker
A couple of years ago, I got into an online spate with a supposed sales “thought leader”. He was a pleasant enough person and had a decent track record as a sales leader, but he was stubbornly fixated on his antiquated views of sales.
It started with his post about salespeople working from home, especially SDR’s, and how that does not work. I don’t accept blanket statements without data, so I asked why. He stated his reasons, then I proceeded to systematically rip his argument to shreds. His response was that salespeople working from home would never work.
Here we are in month six of a global pandemic and guess what? Salespeople are prospecting and closing deals from home. SDR’s are being onboarded and trained remotely. In the chaos, sales are still happening with distributed teams. That is the amazing thing about humans, we can adapt when circumstance require change.
There are many of these “beliefs” floating around in the world of sales. These are ideas that get passed down from one sales leader to the next, to the point that they just become part of the sales canon. To question them is to cast doubt on the collective wisdom and experience of thousands of sales leaders over many decades.
What are some of these sales “truisms”? Here are just a few that continue to circulate widely and often get rehashed on LinkedIn as holy truths:
Sales is a numbers game
SDR’s prospect and AE’s close
You need 8 touches to reach a prospect
Top salespeople are outgoing and charismatic
Always sell high
You are either a hunter or farmer
You may think these are just fine and that I am crazy to take issue with them. The hard truth though is there is little to no evidence to back up any of these statements. And these steadfast beliefs about sales are hurting the ability for sales to innovate and for us as sales professional to elevate our results.
How so? Let me explore each one of these truism.
When we reduce sales to numbers, that becomes the end goal. This leads to perverse behaviors such as a hyper focus on sales activity which causes managers to become taskmasters rather than coaches. The other detrimental effect is that this idea put the numbers ahead of customers. We have seen the consequences of this with the Wells Fargo “8 is great” scandal and the various accounting shenanigans over the years.
When we believe SDR’s do all the prospecting, it creates a negative attitude about prospecting. This is unfortunate since prospecting is a core sales skill that every salesperson should be doing regularly. The Predictable Revenue crowd got this wrong and it has steered an entire generation of sellers down the wrong path.
When we believe that selling means drowning our prospects in automated outreach, we destroy the ability to create credibility, trust, and rapport. This also diminishes the brand in the eyes of the people we most want to buy from us. If our messaging and targeting were better, we would not have to inundate prospects with spam.
When we believe the various tropes about what makes the ideal salesperson, we miss the opportunity to cultivate the truly talented. The Challenger Sale should have dispelled many of these myths about what traits really matter. Another case in point, read about the sales leader discussed in the book Hard Things About Hard Things. Sometimes the best sales professionals are introverted and nerdery.
When we always say sell high, what does that even mean? It misses the context and nuance. If you are selling to mom & pop pizzerias, then calling high to the owner makes sense. What if you are selling a tech product to global banks? You probably are not calling the CEO. What you really need is someone that can be your internal champion to build credibility with the right people.
When we believe that some salespeople hunt and some farm, we ignore the context and forget that many situations require both. The transactional sale is mostly about hunting. The more complex and longer the sale cycle though, the more balance is needed between hunting and farming. This requires nurturing relationships and being more involved with the customer even beyond the initial deal.
These are just a few examples where the “truism” breaks down, and there are many others. The point is that sales is highly contextual. The approach will be different based on the industry, the product, the stage of company, the maturity of the market, and the values of the organization. Truisms are a cheat to avoid the hard thinking about what is right and wrong about our goals, processes, and hiring.
In the startup world where I have spent the bulk of my career, there is a common saying, “if you are not growing, you are dying”. But growing also means the painful process of trying stuff out and potentially failing a lot. Brian Tracy said this regarding growth:
“Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.”
Our attitude should be one of innovation and growth. The secret about the most successful sales professionals is that they failed over and over again before hitting their stride. They only reached that success by questioning the beliefs about sales and taking a different path.
In the same way, the Enterprise Sales Forum also needs to innovate. We have been a community focused on in-person events for six years. But the reality is that those types of events are not coming back anytime soon. This forced us to think hard about what folks like yourself really want and need, to understand how that aligns to our vision, and how best to deliver something of value to you.
Over the coming weeks, we are going to invite our members in waves to a new online community site. There are some sites out there for salespeople already. What is different is that we are not interested in the sales thought leadership echo chamber. We are an open and inclusive community that wants to foster innovation in B2B sales and engage in thoughtful discussion to help all of us level up our sales acumen and advance our careers. Our new site will be a place to once again share, network, and learn, only this time in the online world and connecting all of our global chapters.
I look forward to having you join us there when you receive the invite. We will also be relaunching our event series with more interesting formats and networking opportunities. Thanks again for being an awesome supporter of our work.
Chat again soon!
Mark Birch, Founder of Enterprise Sales Forum
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Everything here speaks to Growth with a capital G. Team Growth and Client Growth lead to True Revenue Growth.
Wow Mark, you have an impressive ability to persuasively articulate your point of view via a keyboard. I appreciate your thoughts and rationale. They make sense. Mark