The issue all the sales experts can run into

Honesty and despite the challenges we face nowadays, I don’t think there has ever been a better time to work in sales.

In the past few years (I would say in the last decade), sales has taken an even more relevant place in the boardroom so a wide area of research and a lot of knowledge is developing around the topic.

It seems we can admit that sales is at the same level of all the other disciplines which make up the broad Business subject and we can only be proud of that.

 

One of the main effects of this transformation is that new generations of salespeople have way more tools at their disposal than the previous generations and are better informed.

Although this may seem like a simple detail, the reality is that all this knowledge changes the sales job by professionalizing it: practically speaking, every new salesperson has way more resources to become a sales expert.

But, what is the main problem a sales expert can face?

 

Let’s start with an assumption: in the long time, experts are much more likely to develop ideas and principles that they stop questioning.

These ideas and principles act as a filter and are crucial in processing new information, but as you can imagine they’re also a limit for the evaluation and adoption of new ideas and new solutions.

When this happens the so-called expertise (when reinforced and never put in a context of horizontal collaboration with other expertise) doesn’t give the practitioner the opportunity to perceive and embrace novelty and change.

 

As I said in the previous article, sales is about decision-making and thinking – you can even picture decision-making and thinking as two ‘muscles’ that you train over time.

When you don’t train your thinking to novelty and change but you just focus on our expertise, you lock yourself in principles and ideas lodged into your the prefrontal cortex and the more you anchor to them, the more you strengthen them in a continuous cycle.

As you can imagine, it’s like a dog biting its own tail.

 

This is precisely why all the experts and especially the new generation of salespeople (many of whom will become sales experts) should train themselves in 2 main things:

• As they develop their expertise, they must always study how this expertise relates to the other expertise in an open and horizontal collaboration.
  By doing this they’ll be able to get out of the niche we all want to lock ourselves into as soon as we think we’re experts in something.
• They must train themselves in ‘critical thinking’ by constantly questioning what they learn.
  They need to be open to novelty and change by remembering that change is not always necessary, but it’s very often useful.

 

One of the first exercises to do is to avoid the ‘scripted’ behaviours we always have been exposed to, especially nowadays.

In the next article I’ll talk about how to avoid scripted behaviours by suggesting an exercise you can do every day avoid the ‘scripted behaviour’ we all fall victim to.