If you were a doctor, would you prescribe without a diagnosis?

Enlightened Sellers mutually explore the prospect’s challenges, and ensure they understand them in detail before they even consider presenting a solution.

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

This is Stephen Covey’s 5th habit of highly effective people and is demonstrated by Enlightened Sellers.

Another way to express it is:

“Diagnose before you prescribe.”

Maybe that’s easier to understand. You would lose faith or confidence in your family doctor if he or she failed to make a thorough diagnosis of any particular ailment before prescribing a course of medicine or other treatments. Enlightened Sellers raise their game on this one and adopt the approach that says, “World-class enquiry precedes world-class advocacy.” They know that the differences that separate the top performers from ‘the pack’ can be minor.

Let’s look at this from a sporting perspective. Take a look at the rankings for the top 100 professional golfers. You can easily access this information on the PGA website, and I did this at the time of writing this article.

I first looked at the top 100 rankings from the perspective of scoring, the average strokes per round of golf of the person ranked number 1 in the world was 69.5. The person ranked number 100 had an average of 71.3 – that’s less than 3% and less than 2 strokes different.

I then looked at the same table in relation to earnings. The official earnings (year-to-date) of the golfer ranked number 1 was $4,854,964. The corresponding earnings for the golfer ranked 100 was $540,865 – that’s almost 9 times less.

Marginal improvements or differences can pay major dividends.

Another example of this is the GB cycling team under the leadership of Sir Dave Brailsford. Brailsford is credited with championing a philosophy of ‘marginal gains’ in British Cycling. The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike and improved it by 1%, you would get a significant increase when you put them all together.

As well as looking at traditional components of success such as physical fitness and tactics, Brailsford’s approach focused on a more holistic strategy, embracing technological developments and athlete psychology. He is noted for his emphasis on constant measuring and monitoring of key statistics such as cyclists’ power output and developing training interventions that target any observed weaknesses.

At the 2004 Olympic Games, Great Britain won two cycling gold medals – their best performance since 1908. Under Brailsford’s leadership, the cycling team continued to improve, winning multiple world championships in road, track, BMX and Mountain bike racing. Great Britain led the cycling medal table at the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games, winning eight golds at both, while British cyclists won 59 World Championships across different disciplines from 2003 to 2013.

So, if you compete with the best in the world (and many of my clients do just that), you need to be aware that even the tiniest differences can yield big results.

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