Becoming a Student of History

Welcome back to the Rethink Sales Newsletter. As fall approaches I am starting to reflect upon the year. But even more so, as I’m looking for patterns and directions in this changing world, I’ve been reflecting on history and the lessons that historical events and human behavior have taught us.

In high school, I thought history was the most boring thing in the world. Why wouldn’t I? I had no context. But over the years, I have found that the more history you have as a person (the older ?and more historical you become), the more fascinating you find the stories of the past.

What does history have to do with creativity? With innovation? It has everything to do with it, because a lot of the ideas that we get are from the knowledge that we have about not only our own area of work, our own area of business, or our own area of life, but about history in general, across many different topics.

For example, let’s look at the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. It was a tense time in the United States – the war against the British had just been won, the Declaration of Independence had been signed, the Constitution had been created. The cost of war and independence was high. So, Alexander Hamilton imposed a government tax on liquor products to help pay for the national debt. U.S. citizens had another idea. They refused to pay the taxes and revolted. Soon the government had to interfere to quell the revolts. It was a polarizing issue that raised the question of appropriate government involvement. It sort of sounds like the Boston Tea Party but with a different beverage and a different government.

The effects of the rebellion were far-reaching, and have sculpted some of our views to this day. Because, that event, and events like it, can express who we are as Americans and our attitudes toward self-determination and government’s role in our lives… which is what we fought for in the first place. So, issues like this, and their underlying principles, remain at the center of many of our debates today. To be creative about addressing our issues today, we have to understand our history as well as the history and practices of other countries, which can actually prompt new thinking. If you look at our issues today myopically or with limited information on history, you won’t have as much to work with and you won’t be as creative at solving the problem.

My first problem-solving point is that you must become a student of history. To be an effective problem-solver, it’s your job to know history broadly, learn how your industry came to be the way it is, and know the history of your customer’s business.

If you think about the history of your profession, sales, think about how the role of sales has evolved over the years. We have a lot of new, different hybrid roles now, as well as completely virtual roles. Where did those roles come from? They came from a historical evolution of the customer and how we work with and meet the customer’s needs.

Allow me to give you a quick fly over and you can investigate the rest…

A long, long time ago there was a simple face-to-face salesperson walking from door to door. It was local because it had to be. Then, if you recall the old black-and-white movies, salespeople moved in cars. They?boarded trains and went out for days or weeks at a time. Some sent letters or telegraphed their customers days ahead of time to set up appointments. They were the original, modern road warriors, not counting the hawkers of old who traveled from city to city with a horse and wagon.

The advent of air travel changed sales completely. That technology accelerated time from days to hours and gave sales organizations access to buyers they could never reach before. And those changes in time and access increased our sales capacity and changed how we structured territories. The concept of account segmentation could be applied across broad geographies. As we looked across bigger groups of accounts, we realized that if we were going to understand customer needs and solve their problems with our products, that some segments, like industry sectors or large accounts, actually had similar needs that we could address more effectively if we looked at them together. We could focus on certain segments rather than certain geographies, because we had more mobility.

Just when we were comfortable with that, we realized that we could sell over the phone. It wasn’t about just making a long-distance call through an operator and switchboard. We had central office and local office high-capacity switches and monster T-1 lines and we could do it at huge volume through call centers and buy long-distance minutes in bulk at cheap rates. That again stepped up our sales capacity and customer access and disrupted the dinner for millions of families as the phone rang off the hook at the wrong times.

Customers learned new adaptive behaviors. They became skilled at slamming down the phone or blowing police whistles into the ears of the poor tele salespeople in call centers. But, when we had that down, then the internet came along. Voice-over-IP technology made long distance available not just to big companies and call centers but to anyone (in the entire world) who wanted to sell by phone, text, or web chat. New telecom networks and software allowed us to set up cheap call centers anywhere around the globe so that sales people could call customers anytime day or night in any time zone.

Fast-forward a few more years and we call this amalgamation of in-person, virtual via video, web, chat, and yes, brick-and-mortar retail… Omnichannel. Know the history of your business, your customer’s business, and explore history at-large because it offers many parallels that can be applied to solving your future challenges.?

My second problem-solving point is that history repeats itself. If there's one thing I remember about history class in high school, it’s that history repeats itself. I still believe this is true. The other was that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But we’ll get to that one at another time. The problem is, if you don't know history, you’ll miss the patterns and you won’t foresee what is going to be repeated.

Here's an example in business. Think about what has happened in industries like technology. Over the past three decades, there has been an evolution in how we buy computers. No, I won’t go through all of that here. But, as it relates to sales, thirty years ago, to buy a personal computer, you had to go to a dealer. You physically got in your car, drove to a specialized technology store, and got your PC configured at that store. You may have had some idea about what you wanted before you went to the store because you read several PC magazines or perhaps got some advice from a friend. But that was about it.

As the general purchasing public or mass market began to understand personal computers , then we began to buy through those PC magazines or over the phone. Eventually, some companies came to dominate the mail-order PC market, others dominated in retail stores, and now we can purchase our computers online and are now in, as I mentioned above, an omnichannel environment. I may learn, shop, and purchase my PC by using a combination of online, video, phone, sales person, or retail channels.

What does this tell us about history repeating itself? The parallel you can apply here is that as the customer becomes more knowledgeable about a product or service, the channels for learning, buying and distributing will change. Take that concept and apply it to your business. Trace the history of your business or your customer’s business. What has changed? What's happening now? What learning can you apply from the history of other industries or businesses? What can you learn from other leaders succeeding and failing?

How businesses have developed, how leaders have led, how they've done well, how they failed all apply today. The more you learn more broadly about history, the more you can apply it to what you do. The more you know about history, the more “knowledge hooks” you build in your brain. The more knowledge hooks you build, the more hooks you have to hang new knowledge on. The more hooks you have, the more quickly my knowledge expands and my learning accelerates.

So, use the principle of Becoming a Student of History to accelerate your learning and creative problem-solving capability. Explore the history of your industry, your customer’s industry, or another industry. Get a good book on a period or event in history. Find the patterns and build your knowledge hooks and apply this principle in your work this month.