SELLING: Just the Professional Version of Chutes and Ladders?

Have you ever played the game of Chutes and Ladders? As someone who has focused on the trials and tribulations of the sales process, studied sales effectiveness, and trained new sales recruits for most of my professional career, it’s amazing to me how much the sales process is like the children’s game. Think about it:

Chutes and Ladders is a simple board game that helps children understand the rewards of doing good deeds and the consequences of naughty ones as they climb up the ladders and slide down the chutes (I don’t know, the look more like playground slides to me but hey, I can use chutes). It comes with a 6-numbered spinner and 4 “cute kid” pawns. The goal is to get to square 100 first!

Let’s play the grown-up version. A couple of tweaks to start:

• The spinner now goes to 7 – the number of actual days in the sales workweek!
• The pawns are still good looking, but now they’re sales reps at different career stages
• There are 100 squares so let’s pretend those squares represent days in the sales cycle (reasonable for a SaaS sale). Getting to the final square would mean that you WON THE DEAL!

The board game board is currently just numbered squares of alternating color – kind of like a checkerboard with numbers. And of course, the board is riddled with chutes and ladders, along with pictures that represent good or naughty deeds that have you quickly advance or fall backwards along the journey.

First, let’s consider the LADDERS – the good deeds.

In the children’s game, the LADDERS are the kind, thoughtful, often empathetic deeds that a child might do, such as rescuing a cat from a tree, sweeping up a mess, completing a chore or returning a purse to the rightful owner.

These actions get rewarded by journey advancement, appropriately reflective of the good deed.

If the gameboard were designed to illustrate advancement LADDERS for salespeople who are building a trusted relationship, those LADDERS might include:

• Presenting good verbal and non-verbal behavior during meetings;
• Empathetically positioning services in a manner that addresses the clients needs;
• Being prepared with compelling questions that advance a conversation, show understanding and empathy, and use techniques to help the other person actually want to share information;
• Introducing a reference who can answer questions about your services that only a client can;
• Sending follow-up materials and a recap of the conversation to the prospect after you meet

On the flip side, let’s consider the CHUTES. In the children’s game, the CHUTES represent things like not doing your homework, sneaking a cookie (and breaking the jar in the process!), breaking a window or going out in the rain without a coat and boots.

In the Selling version, the CHUTES would be things the salespeople do that break or harm the trusted relationship that they need to build and retain with a prospect. This would include trust-breaking actions like:

• Not doing diligence on the prospect and their company before conducting a Discovery conversation;
• Showing up late to a scheduled meeting;
• Focusing solely on features & benefits rather than explaining your service with language that shows you understand the prospect’s needs;
• Not realizing that their behaviors signaled a response that is non-committal rather than a YES;
• Offering the prospect the lowest price as a preferred partner, but he/she doesn’t trust you and asks for a concession to move forward

There are many more scenarios for the CHUTES as well as the LADDERS. Relationships look different by buyer and industry; these are just ones that I’ve encountered with sales teams throughout my career. What’s universal are the rules by which all people build and maintain trust – and like with the LADDERS in the game, they enable advancement of the sales process. When salespeople do things that harm the trust that they’ve developed, that wreaks havoc on the pipeline – just like the CHUTES result in a downward slide. And sometimes we focus so hard on the process that we forget that a salesperson sounding robotic harms trust, resulting in a slide down the CHUTE that may directly affect the bottom line.

Just for fun, here’s what the board and pieces might look like.

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