Supermarket of Mindgames
Sales is a supermarket of mind games. After having managed a team of sales people for one year, what has become evident for me is that there is a smarter crowd out there of partners and customers, who can lure sales people into conceding discounts or favours without any obvious benefit in return. Very often sales teams forget what is in their hand and go after the non existent birds in the bush. For a while I thought this could be remedied by improving business awareness. It goes deeper than that.
It is the way human mind is conditioned to see what they want to see. Sales Teams are conditioned to see the “the big prizes or benefits” offered to them by customers or partners in a reality distortion field created by smart crowd. The creation of reality distortion is pretty easy – promise of a lottery money when you have not taken any lottery ticket through email – was one of them.
In Sales this comes as promise of a market you have never been able to tap, promise of a corporate account you have not been able to approach, promise of government of ministerial business you have not been able to break into – these promises make Sales people drool. They often forget at the yield you are able to break into the said market segment, you would have wiped the floor clean, with a catch – you would have compromised on profitability. Your partner is asking you to give a discounted fare to win a corporate account – Your partner would not have given you anything to win the said account and if you start courting the account, you probably would not have discounted anyway to get the business.
So the question is how to make intelligent decisions to amidst such confusion, how to segregate signal from noise?
The first key is being aware.
I have found myself falling into the same trap when I interact with customers or partners – getting carried away. So as a ground rule for myself I do not make decisions on the spot, I ask for time. I come back and deconstruct the whole story. Approach it from every different angle and many a times when I replay the sound bites, body language, who was trying to sell – me or them. During the reconstruction process of the story – I rephrase many of the sound bites in common language, without the sales pitch and it becomes very evident that – the reality was being distorted.
Second step is being aware – you are not that smart, people you interact with are smarter. You need to work very hard, develop soft eyes, keep your human brain thinking (animal brain sedated, so that the carrot does not appear again and again, distorting realities), in order to make intelligent decisions.
