What do I know...

I was thinking about Anders Ericsson’s Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise © the other day.  I refer to his views often when speaking with senior, experienced, successful sales professionals.  Anders suggests that experience and success can actually lead to complacency.  IMHO, Complacency begets; over-confidence; over-confidence begets corner-cutting; corner-cutting begets getting our lunch handed to us in competitive situations. 

Anders went on to suggest that people in my profession are actually contributing to the problem: 

When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business world, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills.  The main reasons are tradition and convenience:  It is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice. 

I’ve noticed a more worrisome skill-development deficiency situation recently.  At the other end of the salesperson spectrum… our young and inexperienced salespeople. 

Many of our salespeople seem to just want "the answer".  I wonder if that’s what’s behind Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.... machines actually want to "learn"; our junior sales rep audience just wants the answer – is learning too hard? 

Today, my colleagues are continuously trying to come up with the next enablement tool; presentation; job aide.  Their effort and their creativity are awesome!  Unfortunately, I don’t believe creativity solves the problem.  (And I’m not alone). 

Our company has made a huge investment to develop a consistent, systematic selling motion and our leadership expects our salespeople to acquire the knowledge – and the skill – to leverage these tools, tactics, and techniques.  However, to accomplish that takes practice; repetition; and effort outside of their comfort zone. 

The trouble is, it’s painful to become skillful.  It’s also hard to suppress the creativity sales enablement professionals have when we want to come up with a new and different way of enabling.  That’s the creativity problem I mentioned above.  In the book Softwar ©, Larry Ellison put it this way: 

I wanted to get the 'creativity' out of the sales process.  If you want to be creative, go write a novel. 

I expressed my observation to my Manager this way; if our salespeople can’t read the answer is not to write more books.

Truth be told, I feel this gravitational pull of creativity, myself.  When trying to serve my audience; trying to help them sell; when they struggle and are feeling pain, I too want to offer them more of the “answer.”  Even though I know the answer lies in the effort: 

Mastery is a pain… Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the results of intense practice for a minimum of 10 years.  Mastery-of-sports, music, business - requires effort (difficult, painful, excruciating, all-consuming effort) over a long time (not a week or a month, but a decade). 

              Anders Ericsson 

I wonder if today’s salespeople are willing to perfect their profession through the lengthy, painful path Anders suggests.  I mean, if you were having eye surgery you’d expect your surgeon to have practiced the procedure over and over again before trusting them with your eyes, true?  Does that principle apply to the sales profession? 

I believe buyers prefer to buy from the salesperson who has done this before.  But what do I know?  Maybe our young sellers only need the answers to succeed.  Maybe Google’s machines have already done all the learning for them. 

GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.