Be wary of the “one thing” comments on social media regarding sales. Boiling sales down to one point is unwise and minimizes the complexity and context of sales interactions.
You’ve likely seen sales boiled down to:
- empathy
- consistency
- process
- mindset
- listening
- and so on
These are all critical pieces of sales, but stack ranking, prioritizing, or emphasizing one over the other oversimplifies sales.
I always appreciate efforts to simplify, but not at the expense of truth. Sales is a vast and changing landscape. It cannot be boiled down to one thing.
I’ve had the great gift of working with some of the best sales minds in my career. They never boiled sales down to one thing.
What they did well was assess the current context and the moment. They then provided me one thing to consider. e.g., “Sounds like you went a little over the top there, Ted – try pausing and listening next time.”
To then take that and say, pausing and listening is what sales is all about would be to miss selling by a thousand miles.
Context matters. The moment matters.
Sales is the process of helping someone make a positive change and allowing them to own it.
This is the shortest and most comprehensive definition of sales that I can come up with.
Within this definition lives: mindset, lead generation, prospecting, pre-call planning, qualification, process, journey, effecting change, listening, psychological safety, empathy, ownership, objection handling and more…