This past week I read an interview in The Wall Street Journal with Ram Charan —arguably the hottest management guru on the business scene today. He’d just written a book on the need for salespeople to reinvent themselves. He talked about the traits required of salespeople if they’re going to deliver value to their companies.
Chief among them was something I describe as migrating from tell mode to seek mode (my language, not his, but thematically the same).
It reminded me of an experience I had while on a consulting engagement at E.I. DuPont’s headquarters in Wilmington, Del., several years back. While walking down the hall on “executive row,” I was waved into the office of the head of the company’s U.S. sales operations.
Seek mode is counterintuitive
“Jerry, what do you think is the one most important characteristic a salesperson must have to be effective?” he asked me. I could tell from his manner that he’d been thinking about it and believed he had discovered the answer. Never having given that specific question much thought, I did what any self-respecting consultant would do: I launched into a lengthy response pointing out that it was a combination of things, blah, blah, blah!
Then, also in true-to-form consultant fashion, I turned it around and asked his opinion. Gee, do you think he saw though me? His answer, though, was clear, concise, and simple: “A sense of curiosity!”
It hit me immediately that he was right. Sure, there are lots of other very important qualities, such as self-motivation, ego, empathy, and the like, but they’re largely rendered inert without a strong sense of curiosity.
Indeed, as I thought further about the best salespeople I’d ever worked with, I realized they all had that one characteristic in common: a sense of curiosity. Strange, isn’t it, that when we conjure up the caricature of the “typical” salesperson, just the opposite jumps out at us — it’s the gift of gab we think of instead.
Listening better is not seek mode
Perhaps you think this is going to be yet another lecture from yet another self-proclaimed “sales expert” telling you to listen more. It’s not. I’ve been on countless calls with sales professionals who spent an hour or more simply listening to a customer. Too often it ended up being just that: aimless listening to the customer’s similarly aimless talking.
I’ve also worked with salespeople who can drill down on “customer needs” to the minutest level, returning from the call with pages of notes representing the most thorough needs assessment you’d ever want to see. Then, after losing the deal, they wondered what went wrong, since they knew they’d understood the customer’s needs and met them better than the competition.
What these – and so many – salespeople fail to recognize is that operating in seek mode goes far beyond understanding the customer’s needs.
It’s the hard that makes it great!
In what I like to call today’s “new era of selling,” the value of tell mode selling is evaporating almost overnight. A sense of curiosity, properly harnessed, is part of the “minimum system requirements” just to be in the new game.
Operating in seek mode is one of several essential traits of the business resource salesperson (versus the traditional salesperson). I’ll go a step further: it is the most important trait of all. It’s also the most difficult for salespeople to acquire.
About 2,500 years ago, Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, said, “We are not fit to lead an army unless we are familiar with the face of the country.”
Likewise, we are not fit to lead a sales campaign unless we are familiar with the face of the customer. And the face of the customer can be revealed only if we know how to operate in seek mode.
