Listen and Learn

After many years of dedication, practice and personal sacrifice I am proud to announce that I recently mastered the ancient Japanese discipline of Tsundoku – the art of buying books then putting them on a shelf without reading them. I love the fact that our home is full of books, but despair that I will ever get around to reading all of them.

At Sales Kick-Off in London last week, our new Chief Sales Officer Dave Macdonald inspired us with a message of Personal Transformation & the importance of Leadership. While my dogged attempts to complete a Couch to 5k programme or to power through 60 lengths of the hotel pool will never measure up to Dave’s Iron Man exploits, I can at least emulate his heavy consumption of thought-provoking books.

Another great keynote at Kick-off – this time from Tim Riesterer of Corporate Visions on Sales Messaging - sent me straight to my (hitherto unread) copy of Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, a book both fascinating and terrifying in its unfolding explanation of how we really make decisions (spoiler alert: it’s a lot less rational than we kid ourselves it is). Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the emotional side of how people make decisions and how it might change our approach to sales: it’s been a mantra of mine for years that even with the best business case, if your customer doesn’t make an emotional investment in your proposition, they won’t buy into it. Kahneman unpacks the psychology of how and why this happens – it’s a great read.

As is now traditional I got the graveyard slot at Kick-Off (final afternoon) but we did our best to entertain the tired & hungover audience by discussing three great sales wins. The common theme in each case: the account team really listened to their customer. This enabled them to change the nature of the opportunity and focus on what their customer really needed - in each case different from their original requirements.

We could of course take Kahneman’s research and drop it wholesale into sales, but that way persuasion rapidly tips into manipulation: it becomes too blatant and puts us on the side of dictators and demagogues. But one of his core messages – that decision-making is tied up with emotion as much as it is with reason - lands us on safer ground. Listen to your customer, learn about their needs, and success becomes a shared endeavour.

Numbers matter, but needs matter more.