Revisiting the basics
I once had a yoga teacher who said yoga is 5% knowing the poses and 95% practicing them. She may have understated the point: it’s probably closer to 1% knowledge and 99% practice.
The same principle applies in multiple domains. Years ago, when I was obsessively training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I remember noticing that black belts were tapping me out with the same arm lock I had learned in my first class. There was no special innovation they had brought to their game. It was merely that they had exquisitely refined a technique I already knew. Not only did I know the technique, I could also anticipate their use of it in a sparring session, sometimes because they tauntingly foretold what was coming to me. Yet I was powerless to stop the submission from happening. Each and every time it was as though I had been thrown into the deep end and forgotten how to swim.
There are obvious parallels with the professional realm. Our current pace of tech-driven change makes us hyperconscious of the latest breakthrough. We are constantly being pushed to add to our toolkit. We live in a world of frenetic frontward motion, and we’re forever anxious about something we might have missed. But within any complex realm, from mathematics to midwifery, there are axioms and ground truths that the best practitioners have mastered to a greater degree than most.
In the world of B2B sales, some of those basics are:
Start with the customer’s perspective, not your own.
Distinguish between the company agenda, the team priorities, and an individual’s personal interests.
Show the customer you understand their point-of-view on these levels.
Explain how your product or solution can help, ideally with all three.
Use simple messages to be understood, not complex messages to impress.
These are not ground-breaking points. They are excruciatingly obvious, in fact. Yet they are routinely glossed over by most salespeople. True professionals, however, never stray far from first principles.
Like martial arts, sales is a lens through which to better understand life, not just work. The most successful sellers master surprisingly simple truths. Chief among them is the Dale Carnegie tenet of making the other person feel important, and doing so sincerely.
In this moment of quarterly reflection, as we set our intentions for a new period of growth, it might be time to revisit and refine the basics of our craft.