Releasing the freedom to perform through tightening your controls.

I love the idea of paradox in selling. One dictionary definition of paradox explains it as “a seemingly absurd or contradictory statement which when investigated may well prove to be well founded or true.”

In this brief article I want to outline why I believe that our freedom to perform in a sales role can sometimes be enhanced by greater, not lesser control.?

Imagine you were asked to play a football match on a pitch that was on the top of a cliff, with the perimeter lines of the pitch no more than 2 metres from the cliff edge. How free would you feel to throw yourself head long into the match without fear and fully commit to playing at your best. For me, I know the fear of falling off the cliff, or at the very least losing the football and thus having to abandon the match would be uppermost in my mind; thereby not enjoying the match or performing at my best.?

Now imagine you are playing on the same pitch, on the same cliff top, but with a 10-foot high, strong, chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter of the pitch. Your freedom to express yourself and show your skills in such an environment would undoubtedly rise. The element of fear of falling off, or losing the ball, having been removed.

I think going into any selling situation without an understanding of some kind of process that you plan to follow can be a bit like playing that match on the cliff top; the fear of what might happen can stifle your freedom of expression and curtail your ability to truly be yourself. The control or discipline brought by the process gives the confidence that things won’t go too far astray or off course because you know you have a measure of security from the process that you are following. The fear of falling off a cliff, (literally or metaphorically), can be removed or significantly reduced through the control of a process properly applied.

I have written in the past about how slavishly following a process can lead salespeople to miss the opportunity for real authentic connection with customers; connection before process is a kind of mantra in our sales work. However, that does not mean that process is bad. It just means that when used in the right way and with the fundamental understanding that selling is first and foremost about connection, the control brought by process can be a friend in decreasing fear and leaving us free to connect fully and authentically.