When an idea hits me from three different directions at once, I should probably pay close attention—or at least write a blog post about it.
Last weekend, in reading The Obstacle Is the Way, by Ryan Holiday, I noted his advice that one way to make your personal fears and worries diminish is to focus on others. On Monday morning, I also read Mike Kunkle’s blog post about the servant approach to selling, in which he quoted Zig Ziglar’s line that “You get want you want in life by helping enough others get what they want.”
But the real kicker came when I read the morning paper, and came across a real-life demonstration of the power of focusing on others in a life-or-death situation:
Michele Catalano was at his print shop outside of Paris, when he noticed the two brothers responsible for the Charlie Hebdo attack approaching. He quickly told his employee, Lilian, to hide, and went to meet them. During the hour he spent with the terrorists, he managed to keep calm even as they asked him three times whether there was anyone else in the building. As he told the AP: “I stayed an hour with them. I was never scared, because I had only one idea in my head: ‘They should not go to the end (of the hallway) to see Lilian, that’s all.’ That’s what kept me calm.”
I don’t know if Mr. Catalano reads motivational books or blogs, but he instinctively took the best possible course he could have in deadly circumstances. Besides saving his employee, his cool demeanor is probably what led his captors to release him after an hour, so by focusing on keeping someone else alive he managed his own survival.
Hopefully none of us will ever face a situation like that, but the idea of getting what you want by focusing on others has immediate application in sales and in presentations. In sales, focusing on what you can do for the customer rather than on what they can do for you will put you in the right problem-solving mode and make it easier for you to come up with good answers. One reason is that it’s generally easier to think clearly about someone else’s situation than on yours.
Focusing on others is also helpful in delivering presentations, especially if you suffer from pre-presentation jitters. Take the attitude that you have an important message that will help your listeners get what they want, and that outside focus will take your mind off your own internal state and make you more confident at the same time.
Terrorism is the ultimate selfish act—being so wrapped up into your own goals and twisted passions that you are willing to hurt and kill innocent people. We may never understand what drives some people to commit such heinous acts, but fortunately we each have the power within us to be part of the response—to think more of others and less of ourselves.
Seek too hard and you may not find
This morning, Mike Kunkle wrote an excellent article about sales discovery, which is something that sales professionals generally don’t do as well as they should. Mike gives solid actionable advice on how to improve the process, but there is an important distinction I would like to add.
There are two ways to go about the discovery process: you can search or you can explore. Each has its own strengths, but most salespeople do too much searching and not enough exploring.
I would argue that most salespeople go into a conversation with the intent not to explore, but to find. Exploring is truly open-ended: it’s a search for the actual truth, whether or not the truth actually leads to a sale. Finding is getting the answers you are looking for so that it leads to a sale.
Most salespeople don’t do exploring well because they’re not paid to find the truth; they’re paid to find customers.
The difference is that they know what they are looking for, so they craft their questions specifically to lead towards the answers they want. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but unless the truth contains a real need that they may be qualified to address, “searching” questions become patently obvious to the prospect and breed distrust. Even if there is a real need, impatience or lack of skill and subtlety can rush the process and generate resistance.
And if it’s true that your ultimate goal is to jointly create value in which both parties can share, too much of a laser focus can cause you to overlook unexpected opportunities. Indeed, many scientific discoveries came about when a scientist got a fully unexpected result and had the curiosity to pick up the new thread to see where it led. How many of those types of opportunities have you left on the table by ignoring those threads? As Churchill said, “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.”
The difference between exploring and searching, as I see it, is that exploration requires an open mind and a willingness to face up to unlooked-for and unexpected answers—those that might indicate to you and to the prospect that there is no current need for what you’re selling. Exploration requires a different mind-set than searching; it requires humility to recognize you don’t automatically have all the perfect answers; curiosity to ask the extra why; and courage to confront unwelcome answers.
Exploration is less about SPIN and more about humble inquiry, asking questions when you don’t already know the answer you want.
Exploration may be a less efficient and direct path to the sale you’re after, but when your counterpart senses that you’re honestly seeking understanding and not just another handle to grasp the sale, it fosters the trust, transparency and teamwork that leads to mutually profitable long term relationships. It’s the best way to jointly create and share new value.
The paradox is that the best way to get what you want is to be prepared to hear what you don’t.
