Side Quests - A Gamer's Guide to Sales

Greetings, Sales Heroes! It's time for us to embark on another adventure in A Gamer's Guide to Sales. I'm glad so many of you who are NOT gamers have found the concepts in these articles to be relevant to your own work. It makes it worth all the Action Points I spend working on this series. This week, I'm going to explore the concept of Side Quests and how doing work not directly tied to closing deals can both be of benefit to a Sales Hero, but also serve as a fatal distraction.

If you missed the Action Points joke in the opening paragraph, I encourage you to go back and read Adventure 3: Action Points!

> Side Quests as a Gaming Concept

Side Quests are a standard feature of roleplaying games. They serve two key functions (among many; feel free to argue with me in the comments below):

1. They give you an opportunity to skill up, gear up, and level up before you have to go face a critical part of your main adventure. By spending time on side quests, you can better prepare yourself to achieve your primary goal.
2. Sometimes, your primary goal is so far away as to seem unachievable. It can be demoralizing to keep slogging toward something so far off. A Side Quest gives you the opportunity to take focus off the main goal, temporarily, and achieve a victory on the short term that can re-invigorate you.

It should be apparent that both of these key functions can translate pretty directly into the world of business. Sometimes, working on something that isn't directly moving toward quota attainment can help us get better at our work and better enable us to reach that quota. And sometimes, especially in the start of a fiscal year, our annual quota is so far off that it helps to be able to rack up some easy wins and keep spirits high.

Let's begin by looking at some of the dangers of Side Quests before we explore those benefits a bit deeper.

> The Dangers of Side Quests

Mike Weinberg , in his book "Sales Management Simplified", has a great insight on why sales professionals often end up entangled in non-sales tasks. Sales Heroes are problem solvers. They spend all day navigating complex issues; matching their solutions with customer business problems, navigating client budgeting challenges and processes, triangulating relationships to help unlock opportunities, and more. Sales Heroes are excellent communicators, conflict navigators, and able hands at client management.

For all these reasons, it's easy for a Sales Hero to go from "Let me try and help improve the communications on this customer trouble ticket" to "I need a meeting with all of Product Management to review road maps for the next six months and make sure we're properly prioritizing customer needs in feature additions". Which, for the record, is not an efficient use of a Sales Hero's Action Points.

When a Sales Hero is going to step away from their primary focus of selling to engage on a side task, they have to be sure they are clear on what their goal is when engaging. Clear not only with the people they are helping directly, but with themselves and anyone else that task intersects with. Otherwise, they run the risk of this little diversion turning into one of the most dangerous of all beasts; The Distracting Side-Task.

> Keeping Side Quests From Becoming Distractions

Sales Heroes getting involved in non-sales activity is unavoidable. It's necessary, even. For example, few people are as useful in navigating a frustrated client as a Sales Hero. Unless a client has been with an organization for a significant amount of time, or it's recently transitioned account managers, chances are that a sales professional has by far the most time communicating with a given client.

That history builds relationships and it builds trust. And until the organization has had time to build an organizational relationship (shout out to all of our friends in #CustomerSuccess), a Sales Hero can often be the credibility an organization needs to navigate client frustration. But you can't let yourself get bogged down like the horse from The Neverending Story and lost forever.

Here are the keys to keeping a Side Quest from becoming a Distracting Side-Task:

1) Know Your Exit

When you jump in to take on a task that isn't in your primary role, you have to know when your involvement ends. And you have to be clear with everyone around you about that. Otherwise, you'll just drift away from an ongoing engagement at some point and leave everyone feeling abandoned.

Are you jumping in to help straighten out a customer support issue? Admirable! Make sure everybody knows you're just there to make sure the communications get straightened out, that you don't expect to be a part of the troubleshooting calls, and that all parties can reach out again later if things get off track.

Are you helping Product Management set up some client interviews so they can get input on the future direction of the product? That sounds awesome! But your bank won't accept "Client Interviews Booked" as payment on your mortgage. As engaging as those discussions can be, they can take up a lot of Action Points to attend. Co-ordinate and follow along after to get the Cliffs Notes.

Whenever you jump in, make sure that you and everyone around you knows how and when you jump out.

2) Build Your Party

If you haven't read the first article in this series, Assemble Your Party, now might be a good time to grab a coffee and do so.

You are most effective not when you are involved in everything happening around you, but when you have a team of trustworthy and capable experts that are involved in those things. This is one of the hardest things for technical professionals to adjust when they transition into sales roles; understanding that it's not your job to solve every problem, but it IS your job to make sure those problems are getting solved. It's a huge shift in thinking, and one a lot of former sales engineers struggle to make.

If you find you are constantly having to jump in to help solve the same sort of problem, then you (or your organization) aren't building up the capabilities of others to be able to handle those things without you. You may believe that the best way for people to learn how to fix these things without you is for them to watch you fix it, but VERY few people can learn solely by observation. If you want people to learn something, you have to teach them. If my first Game Master had tried to teach me how to make a character by filling out the sheet for me each time, I'd never have learned. He had to give me the source books and template, watch me fill it out, and patiently correct me when I made mistakes.

(Side note: If that analogy didn't work for you, substitute "Father" "hit a baseball" "swinging the bat himself and making me watch" and "let me take my own swings" where appropriate.)

You may feel like you don't have the time to slow down and teach. But I promise you that the investment of APs now in teaching somebody else how to solve their own problems is much more efficient than constantly being pulled away from your own goals to stop and solve the same problem over and over again.

3) Be Willing to Walk Away

Most importantly, Sales Heroes need to understand that they won't be completely successful every time. Sometimes, a recurring task is just too distracting. Sometimes a project just isn't coming along the way it needs to. Other times, the issue just isn't being worked by the right group of people.

These are the times when you need to be willing to recognize that you aren't the right Hero to complete this particular Quest. Not every Quest is designed with your skillset in mind, and not every dragon was meant to be slain.

Inform those that you're working the problem with that you need to step away. Escalate to your leadership, or the leadership of the appropriate team. Let them know what efforts you've expended already, but level with them that you don't believe you can reach a successful conclusion to this task. Be clear that you believe you're receiving diminishing returns on your effort and that continued focus on this task is just too much of a distraction from your primary responsibility of delivering revenue.

The universal truism remains in effect: Never present your boss with ONLY problems, always suggest solutions. You're not washing your hands of an intractable problem, you're handing off responsibility to somebody with a different set of tools.

> But Side Quests Aren't All Bad!

As explored in the opening of this article, embarking on a Side Quest can be richly rewarding and a significant aid to you in not only your overall career development, but also your ability to achieve your near-term and long-term sales goals.

> Heroes Never Stop Learning

Our world is, unlike the worlds we often find in games, one of constant change. If you ever stop learning about your industry, your clients, your teammates and Party Members, you will immediately begin to fall behind. A real Sales Hero never stops levelling up.

You are most valuable to everyone around you, if you are a consultative Sales Hero, when you have fresh and valuable knowledge. If clients didn't need the knowledge and expertise of sales professionals, your product or service would be for sale on Amazon.com. You exist to be a source of knowledge.

A good Side Quest is one that teaches you valuable information that you didn't have before. If you jump in on a support ticket and learn about new changes to desktop PC security, that can help your other clients avoid trouble down the road. If you spend an hour taking a client to lunch, even if they have no business in front of you at the moment, you may learn about some changing trends in corporate real estate or staffing or expense policies, or, or, or.

Listening to people can teach you a world of things that can be of value to you, to your internal teams, organization leadership, and to other clients. If I have the option of doing business with somebody who REALLY knows their widgets, or another person who knows widgets just as well, but is ALSO able to teach me about how the world of widgets is changing in the next few years, who do you think I'm going to trust more?

> Side Quests Can Help You Skill Up

Early in your journey as a Sales Hero, you will hear a LOT of mentors tell you that you need to be selling at the highest level possible. They'll encourage you to go right to the CxO! Go to the person with the most authority you can find.

They're right, but do you know what's intimidating and completely fraught with danger? Trying to sell something to a CxO when you've never interacted with a C-level officer before. You need the level up your experience with executives before charging into the corner office!

Often, your best opportunities to interact with executives and other high-level individuals at a client organization will NOT be through sales engagements at the start of your career; it'll be through problem solving on post-sales issues.

It's not uncommon for a Senior VP or other mid-to-high level executive from the client side to jump in when a project isn't going to plan. Get in there, open your ears as wide as you can, and observe. You'll find that the kinds of things you thought a senior corporate leader cared about are often quite off-base.

If you're in the SaaS space, you may regularly hear that clients will prefer your widget-as-a-service because "They can spend OpEx instead of CapEx". I've met many CFOs and I can assure you a net total of zero of them have ever said "Oh, it's OpEx? Why didn't you say so. I no longer care about the price."

Similarly, IT Security Managers often have FAR bigger concerns than what ports and protocols a solution uses. CREOs don't ONLY care about cost per square foot and probably care less than you think about the new fountain in the lobby.

People, as a general rule, are far more complicated than you think. And you only learn what motivates people by observing them. A Side Quest that intersects with executive leaders can be a great way for you to start understanding what "the corner office" is actually concerned with in the current market, build your reputation at a particular client, and better prepare you to speak with ANY executive.

> Re-Fueling for the Long Journey Ahead

My father (the utterly unique Bernie Coyle ) emphasized to me early in my career that it was important to have an "aircraft carrier". Everyone needs a home base they can return to, after ranging out far afield on some mission or adventure. We all need a place we can go back to in order to refuel and ready ourselves for the long campaign.

A good Side Quest can be just this. When your confidence tank is running a bit low, it can be a true invigoration to jump into a side project and rack up a quick win. Accomplishments, by definition, make us feel accomplished. And sales is a confidence game. If you don't believe in yourself, it's impossible to get others to believe in you and to invest in your solutions.

When your quota seems so far off as to be a distant dream, and economic headwinds are picking up, and your path to victory is unclear, it's okay to take a moment to catch your breath. Fly back to your aircraft carrier, head back to your home base, find a monster-free clearing and make camp. Choose your own analogy, here.

And then look around for somewhere that you can contribute without getting bogged down. Look for on opportunity to Build Your Party, to help your organization increase vision through the Fog of War, or some task that can help you better you manage your time and your pool of Action Points (It's almost like these concepts were designed to work together).

Or just take your favorite customer to lunch. People appreciate it when you don't always show up with your hat in your hand.

> Wrap-Up

Side Quests can either be great experience builders for you that make it easier for you to achieve your long-term goals OR they can be bleak swamps of sorrow that make it impossible for you to ever make forward progress. The choice is entirely yours.

Go into these things with the right mindset, with a short-term goal clear in your head, and with an exit plan if things spiral out of control. Remember, Sales Hero, you have an entire organization counting on you to deliver for them and the trust in your judgement that comes with that responsibility.

Safeguard that trust, be sure that you don't run off onto every Side Quest that presents itself, and you're on the path to long-term success.

Questions, Comments, Quemments? Please feel free to share in the comments below. Image credits this week go to David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay?on the treasure chest and The Homebrewery over at Natural Crit for the RPG guidebook template.