What would it be like to really look in the mirror?

I got the perspective of a person we’re all trying to sell to. I had a conversation with the CIO/CTO of Legalzoom. His name is Tracy. I wanted to hear what someone like him thought of the sales profession. He takes my call, but it was only out of courtesy to a colleague. We get on the phone, and within the first minute, he launches in with, “You need to know something about me, Ben.”

“What’s that?”
“I just took down my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.”

And I thought that was a weird way to start the conversation.
But then with zero uncertainty, he follows with, ” Its because I hate salespeople.”

And he begins to rip into the entire business of selling; how disingenuous we are, an overall lack of empathy. He says, “Its all about you guys, hitting your quotas, its not about the customers, salespeople are in it for their own gain. And as I was listening to him, I was trying to stay with him, but it was hard to. I started to feel defensive. He even used the word, “inhumane” to describe how it all feels to him. He added, “Its getting worse, not better.” And I could feel him getting angry towards me even. I wasn’t trying to “sell” him anything though; at least I didn’t think I was. But then I wondered that the only person worse than a salesperson is the person who “trains” them – me. I was guilty. So, I wanted to fight back. But he saved me from that, because what he ended with was like the mother of all Aha moments. He ends with, “You all come in with all your solutions, looking for problems.”

And in that instant, I got it; I got where he was coming from. He nailed our industry’s entire model, with that one quick anecdote.

And as I heard that, all my defenses went down and the only thing I was able to return was an agreement.

“I think you’re right, Tracy. That’s exactly how I was trained – to look for problems.”

So I asked if I could share with him how I was trained (and re-trained, and re-trained through the years, with several variations of the same theme).

We’re supposed to open up a meeting with an agenda; ask if that sounds reasonable, then ask permission to ask a series of questions; oh by the way, questions that have been described in a playbook for us. And the intent of those questions were solely to solicit the pains we’ve been prompted to identify; we then have a set of solutions to each of the potential set of pains, and if we get there, we then gather the impact of those pains, and put it into a spreadsheet to show a projected ROI. If we get there with you, we then ask for others in the organization that have “power”. After that, we try to document the so-called, buying processes and document that into a project plan together, as if we’re partners…

I’m going on and on, and with such irony, I’m feeling proud I could present the entire process to him. And I end with, “Tracy, that is how I was trained, in order to “sell” to someone like you.”

And as I gave him the full tutorial on the enterprise sales model, a wild, unexpected shift happened. He started to use the word “they” instead of “you”. In the beginning of the call, he kept saying, “All you guys do is…” But afterwards, I remember him saying, “They have you…” He said, “They teaching you to misbehave.” And I could tell that his feeling towards me shifting. I didn’t ask him this, but I knew 100% that his initial disdain for salespeople, and by extension, me for that matter, shifted to feeling sorry for us. There was no doubt that he had empathy towards us, towards me, towards the entire culture of selling. I could feel him, saying to himself, “Aw, that sucks.” It was no longer our fault as salespeople.

This was a very eye opening experience for me. And I’ve thought about that conversation with Tracy a lot since then. It was as if his shift embodied the idea that good people in bad systems, can do bad things. That his perception towards people shifted to an indictment on a system; a culture of scripts, playbooks, decks, tactics, memorized pitches, questions, and its breeding a lifeless, soulless culture of robotic, mechanical behaviors.

For me, acknowledging this is a tough pill to swallow; I spent the better part of my career in that problem-solver, process-driven, know-it-all solutions, mode. Can you imagine using these tactics on the people we love the most in our lives? Its not hard for me to do. For me, I had a tough time turning these behaviors on and off. Taking “Problem-solver” mode home with me; interrogating my kids with a ton of questions to find out about their days, only to get one word answers, no different than bad sales calls. Or worse, always having the so-called solution for my wife when she has a tough day.
But there is a different way. A shift towards openness, collaboration and sharing – a focus on sincere connection. But that would require us – salespeople – to open ourselves up, and detach from the process, from the scripted answers, and share our authentic experiences; who we are, who our companies really are, including all the not so fluffed up content, and actually be willing to listen to someone else’ authentic experiences, including maybe we we don’t “want to hear.”

A good friend of mine, Jesse, reinforced this for me. He’s as good as a salesperson gets, by every measurement. People – his customers, his colleagues, all love him. It’s just very easy to buy what he’s selling. He puts people at ease, and seems to have that knack. People will move mountains for Jesse. I know because I have talked with his customers. He has an extraordinary impact on people. But maybe it wasn’t always that easy for him. Jesse has a Masters in Social Work. Last year, he and I just shared a ride from downtown Chicago to O’Hare, and in that 30-minute ride, I absolutely needed to hear what made him tick. He shared with me his life story; traumas and struggles that led to what he thought would be a career as a Social Worker. It was driven by a deep, sincere desire to help people. But after getting his Masters degree, he decides to apply his experiences to Sales, but selling something that had purpose. And when he begins
to talk about his first experience in Sales, he starts to laugh. He’s cracking up when he describes his first interview, needing to explain himself in that interview when asked, “Masters in Social work… so why Sales?”

But to him, the answer was self-evident; how Sales should be no different than Social work.

“Social work is about meeting people where they are, connecting with them. Getting people to share their experiences, and helping them open up new doors in life.”

And when I ask him what he thought about all his sales training, his response reinforced Tracy’s message, “We don’t take the ‘diagnose the problem and prescribe the solution’ approach. We can’t. In Social work, it’s about connecting with the client, providing a safe place where they can share their experience and accompanying them through that experience towards a new narrative.”

Jesse is the one of the most transparent, open-minded, resilient, passionate, caring, vulnerable, strong people that I’ve ever worked with. He so authentically shares and he listens. The problem is that these are not steps in a process – maybe, though, these things are everything.

There’s no empathy in selling cuz we don’t know any better. Here’s a lesson in becoming more attractive… for the right reasons. hashtag#undosalestraining Following their rules is what makes us unattractive. Why is the sales profession so universally disliked?

Twenty years ago, when I was a sales rep, my #1 stress was my sales manager.

I hated everything I had to do for him. I especially hated our weekly team meetings. We’d start the week off by getting interrogated about our pipelines, our forecasts, our activity, and our “commits.” It was more than a waste of time; it was de-motivating. It would suck the life out of us. And the worse thing looking back was that everyone lied to each other in those meetings. But we had to do it. And I could tell that even my manager hated his own meetings.

I swore that when I was promoted to sales management, I would never do this.
But as soon as I was promoted to management, I didn’t know what else to do, so I did the same thing. Looking back, it was like that experience being a kid, feeling, “I’m never going to be as crazy as my parents when I grow up”, but then waking up one day, realizing I’ve become the very thing I disdained.

My weekly Sales Meetings were like bad sales calls. I’d call my reps in, and interrogate them the same way I’d been interrogated when I was a rep: “What do you have this week?” “The forecast?” “Pipeline?” Not surprisingly, I didn’t get straight answers either. The sales reps were just like I was: their #1 goal was to get me off their backs. Being open & authentic wasn’t an option.

There was zero safety and permission given for transparent and honest communication. It’s little wonder why I never really connected with my reps the way I could connect with my customers. But I didn’t know a better way.

<strong>A Lesson from the NFL</strong>

There was a rare, beautiful moment in the NFL this week. If you haven’t caught New York Giants’ Head Coach, Tom Coughlin’s retirement press conference, spend a few minutes listening to him reflect. If you don’t have time to watch the entire conference, just watch from the 12:00 minute mark to the 14:00 minute mark: <a href=”http://www.giants.com/news-and-blogs/article-1/Watch-Coach-Tom-Coughlins-farewell-press-conference/ba7cf9ac-e921-4694-b111-159935765039″>Tom Coughlin Retirement Press Conferernce.</a>

And if you are really short on time, here is the particular part I wanted to share:

“What has become extremely important to me as I’ve grown in this position is relationships. Relationships have become the primary objective in my career. I still have a hard time when former players, guys who we battled together, they’ve been corrected, I’ve been mad at them, they’ve been mad at me, so on and so forth, after a year or two, sometimes not even that long, they walk up to me and say, I love you, coach. When that first happened to me, I didn’t know how to respond. I was like, Whoa, wait a minute. This is a big old tough-guy business. We’re not supposed to be able to say that and do that.

 I can tell you right now it has become the source of drive for me, is that when our players, whether they’re in their career, after their career, when they come back to me and they say, Coach, I love you. They follow that up by saying they’ve become better men, better husbands, better fathers, better friends because of their experience having been a New York Giant.”

But there are deeper layers to this story that we can draw from. Here is the back story on Coughlin:

Before he was hired as the head coach of the NY Giants, he spent 30 years as a journeyman coach, bouncing around from team to team in various roles. In 2004, he becomes the head coach of the NY Giants. He came from an extreme military style background, regimented, dictatorship, managed his players as if he was in the military. He gets the head coach job in NY when he was 60 years old.

He worked under the legendary Bill Parcells, but admits that early on, he didn’t understand Parcells’ style – especially how Parcells would become tight with his players. He hated how Parcells would give special treatment to some players, and not to others. He thought teams should be run exactly like the military: coaches shouldn’t be close with the players, and treat everyone the same. Coughlin was “that” coach.

In a documentary about Coach Coughlin a few years ago, Michael Strahan, the Giants best player, shared his experience with Coughlin. Strahan talks about his first season with Coughlin – actually in the preseason of that first year, Strahan storms into Coughlin’s office and tells him it would be his last year with the team. He would leave after the season and become a free agent. And then Strahan tells him, “You are losing this team.”

But Coughlin ignores Strahan. Keeps going about his business his way. So, the team starts the season off underachieving, and the NY media is calling for the Giants to fire Coughlin. The players start a revolt in the locker room; total disarray. About a third of the way into the season, Coughlin confesses he pulls Strahan behind closed doors to have a heart-to-heart. And because the team was pretty much “done” Coughlin pleads for help from Strahan; not by choice, but for survival. And then something clicks for Coughlin.

At the age of 62, Coughlin shares how he experiences a break down. He talks about how he decides to rewire himself, relearn, learn to be personal with his players, get to know who they are personally, and what makes them tick. He learns to be more flexible, unlearns his military, dictatorship style. He learns to be more like Bill Parcells. He re-wires himself in every way… at the age of 62!

And he describes this “change” as this constant struggle for him; how fighting his own tendencies is ongoing. He talks about this transformation he goes through not as if it was “turning on a light switch”, but more as a practice, an ongoing work-in-progress. And it wasn’t easy for him.

But on the other end of this awareness, he begins by enlisting open and honest peer-to-coach communication, fosters peer-to-peer communication, which is totally antithetical to his previous philosophy. He talked about being able to see his players different, and the way he reflects in his press conference is evidence.

As we know, the Giants go onto to win 2 Super Bowls. But in his retirement press conference, he doesn’t talk about the wins or the rings, its about love and and the relationships with his players. He talks about a deep and lasting culture that comes from player-to-player connection, and player-to-coach connection. A culture of safety and love; something not synonymous with the NFL.

<strong>You Can’t Teach Old Dog’s New Tricks.</strong>

But I often hear from leaders, “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” Coughlin does it at 62. Before I co-founded Storyleaders a half a dozen years ago, I felt I needed to learn more about people, how we communicate and respond to each other. I found myself immersed in the neurosciences. It was an exhilarating period for me. I was exploring groundbreaking science that provided answers previously off limits in my profession: the business of Sales Training.

A lot of what I was learning began to inform me that, in fact, there is a better way; a different way. I now share what I’ve learned in my workshops; how our internal systems work, where connection, inspiration and trust come from.

Neuroplasticity; how our brains are in a constant state of re-wiring throughout our entire lives. And for me, this may be the most important piece of the neuroscience – dispelling the myth that people don’t change. We are hard wired to change; its been wildly misunderstood. So, here is a lesson that will serve sales managers well; something that eluded me when I was a sales manager.

<strong>Dinner At The Firehouse</strong>

A profession that really understands connection and relationships are Firefighters. They have long understood the value of peer-to-peer sharing, connection and institutionalized culture building. Every night, in firehouses across the country, firefighters take part in a tradition where they share stories about their day. But it’s more than just a social ritual; it’s a means by which firefighters learn from one another’s successes and failures and builds institutional memory within their departments.

Dinner is about providing everyone the safety and permission to openly share their stories, where everyone has a chance to share their mistakes and their achievements.

The goal – to make sure every single member of the firehouse has the same level of skill, but also that the group achieves connection and a common purpose. And it comes from real storytelling.

<strong>Sales Managers:</strong> what if, for starters, sales meetings felt more like the tradition of Dinner at the Firehouse vs. the typical sales meeting?