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Selling Is an Away Game: Close Business and Compete in a Complex World
LANCE TYSON
The problem with selling today is that there’s no home-field advan- tage. It’s an away game, taking place in the buyer’s mind. As the sales- person, you have to determine how much the potential buyer, or the prospect, knows or doesn’t know. They actually might have a lot more information than you, or a different version of information, so you’ve got to somehow get into their head and enable them to share, so you can help them ultimately weigh out whether the decision’s right or not.
Sales has become complex because nobody has figured out how to make it simpler. If you go back to the late 1800s to John Patterson of the National Cash Register Company (NCR), he invented a new concept called a cash register. At the point of entry, instead of shopkeepers keeping their balances in a ledger, they now could take a customer’s money, push certain buttons, and it would tell them how much money they had left over in addition to how much product they had left over. Brilliant, right? But you have to think about the late 1800s. How the hell
are you going to get the word out about a cash register? Nobody knows what a cash register is. You’ve got Mr. Olson on Little House on the Prairie operating the mercantile out of a cigar box and a ledger book. Imagine NCR’s sales rep riding into Walnut Grove, going up to Mr. Olson, and saying, “Hey, Mr. Olson. Do you mind if I ask you how you manage your money?” Mr. Olson pulls out a shotgun. “What the hell are you asking me that for? That’s a personal question.” Then the sales rep might say something like, “Hey, hold
on. I’ve got this concept. If you’re like most storekeepers, you probably spend hours a day balancing your books, making sure you’re following up on the Ingalls family, who are always late and always asking for credit. You’re trying to figure out what you have: how much yarn, how many yards of wool, right? I actually have this machine that can save time and be more accurate.” Mr. Olson is intrigued, but skeptical. “What are you talk- ing about? What machine?” “Well, can I show you?” asks the sales rep. So he would train Mr. Olson how to use it. He’d have it for a couple months, put it on consignment. This guy John Patterson came up with a four-or-five-step sales process, and that’s how NCR sold their cash registers. Let’s face it. What’s really changed in sales since then? Not much. Now we communicate over emails, LinkedIn, phones, and text messages in our selling. We still have to go through the same steps. But the most effective sales- people think through the mind of the prospect.
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