Sneak up behind someone and poke them with a safety pin and they jump.   Do it 100 times to a 100 different people and you will get the SAME result.

It’s human nature.  It’s a reaction that all people have.  Going a little deeper — it’s a subconscious reaction to feedback from our nervous system.  Millions of impulses every second tell you that you are in pain — to move your body away from the source  of pain.

It’s not even something you think about.

Which brings me back to the topic of my recent angst — sales strategies based on stats…

Sales research is cool (our teams do a ton of it), but building your sales strategy around market perceptions research is absolutely senseless.  I am not sure where we business people went so wrong, but the practice of “wind sniffing” is eroding the foundations of our businesses.  We happily produce neutered sales teams while happily sharing the stats around why we are making stupidly uninspired decisions.
We attempt nothing grand, challenging, or edgy.  Instead we “grow a set of stats” and use them as a billy club to keep the sales guys in line and unoriginal.

Here is how it works:

1. “Business A” wants to generate more money in their marketplace…
2. Executives research what people are buying and doing in the “Business A” marketplace…
3. Sales team tasked to deliver on getting more people in the “Business A” marketplace to buy more…

Seems harmless.  In fact, you might be thinking: “this sounds like a great idea to me; why so much frustration, Daniel?”

But here are the problems:

1. You can’t improve something by executing a “more of the same” sales strategy… (i.e. Bad people doing bad things produce bad things in bad ways.  Copying that is bad too.)
2. Multiple snapshots of buyer activity produce vastly inconsistent data… (i.e. Like 5 blind dudes with a elephant you get a difference perspective every time you roll out of bed and check your numbers.)
3. People don’t want what they say they want… (i.e. People don’t want to pay a “fair price”.  They want to pay “their fair price.)
4. Stats bear “builder bias” not facts… (i.e. You can’t escape that you will already have most of the answer before you start working on looking at your “viral stats”.)
5. Everybody else is equally as motivated to improve mediocrity (i.e. Improving your hustle over your competitor just means that you look like an idiot more times to more prospects.)

Building on mediocrity still has the failure of mediocrity at the foundation — which really negates the “building” part of the scenario…  (DEWism)

Watching what people are doing or how they are acting is a good operational practice but quite limited when it comes to sales.  It breaks down to Maslow and understanding people.

People do what people do because they are people  and that’s what people do…

Instead of researching what already exists  – what people are already doing — spend time on what you WANT people to be doing.  That should be your ONLY concern.  What people are doing is already the past.  Your vision for them promises a new and better future.

Here is a stat for you:  99.99% of people want to live and love… Lose your sales stats and sell that with passion…

[...and a Happy Birthday to my mother who taught me to live with courage, to strive for excellence, and to never back down from my obsession with changing the world...]