I’ve always thought about sales as a complex adaptive system, just as in physics.
Sales is a complex adaptive system because it’s a dynamic system made up of many individual parts interacting among them.
One of the most important characteristics of these systems is that they generate emergent behaviors: these are new behaviors that cannot be predicted by simply analyzing the single units of the systems.
In other terms, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Because of this ‘The Sales Strategist’ main aim is not to teach you how to sell: it would be unreal.
Sales is a complex adaptive system and no one can teach you ‘the whole’.
No one can teach you the emergent behaviors like the instinct, which is still relevant for every sales person and develops from environmental structures, evolved brain capabilities and general rules.
The only way you can learn how to sell is selling, that’s it.
Who tells you the opposite is lying or has never sold before.
Despite everything the whole is still made of single parts so learning and improving them is still the most effective sales training.
In other terms ‘the whole’ is up to the person who learns, the single parts are up to the person who teaches.
Based on this thinking I set the 3 main objectives of ‘The Sales Strategist’:
1. Train the sales person on the single parts of the sales process giving her the foundations to work independently;
3. Help the sales person maximizing the long-term results with the most effective set of actions to execute.
These 3 objectives lie on a concept that can be considered the cornerstone of ‘The Sales Strategist’: the transformation of the strategic thought in tactical activity, filling the gap between theory and practice, between plan and action.
Because the whole is more than the sum of its parts but learning and improving them is still the most effective sales training, probably the only one.