If you ask me what makes a successful salesperson, one of the last things I would tell you is sales experience. Strangely enough, throughout my career as a sales leader, a lot of the typical things you would normally see a sports hiring manager look for in identifying the perfect salesperson - like prior sports sales experience, an impeccable performance in an interview roleplay, or a sports management degree - did not equate to sales success for the people I have managed. Instead, one of the factors that stood out most as a key to sales success was what I refer to as “life experience”.
My definition of life experience has been, until recently, incredibly basic. Life experience is simply encountering situations throughout your life that you learned from or gained insight from. For example, a salesperson who had a parent who was an executive in the banking industry tends to have a greater grasp on how the financial world works from conversations they heard at the dinner table. Or a salesperson that grew up close to an uncle who owned a concrete company likely knows a few things about the construction industry from hearing that uncle talk about how he has to spend more time in the field these days.
For those of us who do not come from a convenient bloodline, rest easy, life experience can come from anywhere. Education, age, moving to other parts of the country (or world). reading, working, investing, and interacting with diverse groups of people are all great ways to add to your life experience. Best of all, sometimes you gain life experience through dealing with a curveball life throws your way.
In a one-on-one meeting several years back, I had a salesperson talk me through a “major” challenge she was facing. She lived with a roommate who took a job in another market and was moving in a few weeks. The challenge is that they had jointly signed a lease extension a month prior and the terms of that extension left them jointly liable for rent payments for the next 11 months- a lease she did not have the resources to cover on her own.
While she dreaded every second of the less-than-ideal situation., I challenged her to think differently. These circumstances offered an opportunity to develop incredible life skills. She was going to need to ask tough questions of both her roommate and landlord, negotiate a reasonable payment from her roommate for breaking her part of the lease, and she would need to attempt to renegotiate lease terms.
To accomplish all of these things, she would need to ask meaningful questions, identify what was most important to all involved parties and act accordingly, negotiate, and finally create a mutually beneficial end game. All incredibly important skills needed to be a great business-to-business salesperson!
For a long time, I felt completely content with my understanding of life experience and my ability to share the values of it. I used examples like the one mentioned above to assist salespeople in developing life skills that made them better sellers. I was partially right. While I valued the way different experiences in a person’s life made them think, I believed the greatest advantage to more life experience was the ability to have a wider net by which you could make a connection with a prospect. Like I mentioned in a prior post, I thought that showing some experience could provide the relevance a salesperson needed to have a meaningful business conversation.
Then I read Range by David Epstein. The book challenges the widely-believed notion that mastery of a field or skill comes from hyper-focused specialization on it. Instead, it offers example after example where the toughest problems have been solved by individuals with wide-ranging, diverse experience instead of experts. In many of the instances, the experts failed to see anything outside of their limited specialty-centric view, like blinders for a racehorse and missed what would be helpful to reach a solution from some other field. As I turned each page, it became clearer that the greatest value in creating a range in your skillset and knowledge base came through the way it made you think.
Subject matter experts fall victim to overlearned behavior. They expect everything to relate directly to what they have learned in their particular field because that is what they have trained their mind to expect. Their perceived knowledge has limited their ability to think through challenges in the most advantageous way.
Salespeople, can we relate?
By monotonously training ourselves on the best response to an objection or practicing the opening statement to get a prospect’s attention over and over, we very well may be falling into the overlearned behavior trap. Our goal as salespeople is to identify a problem a prospect is facing and offering a solution to fix it. If we are so narrowly focused on how we aim to fix that particular issue, we risk missing the answer that would lead to a sale. When sales are harder to come by, the ability to be a problem solver equipped with a wide range of knowledge becomes that much more important.
For all those salespeople who want to become more complete sellers, start learning something other than sales. Next time you get the urge to pick up a sales book, call an audible. Having range in your knowledge base and using it to broaden the way you tackle a sales problem can have a greater impact than any closing technique.
Need a recommendation on what to do? Feel free to ask.
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Evan Gitomer is a contributor to The Strategic Sports Group newsletter.