Now is not the time to be an existentialist as collective society is restricting free will for anyone seeking to develop their potential right now. Or is it?
In the bleak, dystopian play by Samuel Beckett, our two protagonists while away the hours doing not a lot, wondering whether the mysterious Godot will eventually show up. The wait is painful, mournful even, as the two engage in cyclical, repetitive dialogue and activity in a futile attempt to fill their days (spoiler alert) …. For the man who never shows.
Life has a terrible habit of imitating art. I bet you think you know where I am going with this, so I apologise in advance for disappointing you! The core themes of this play are more applicable to those of you in sales at this moment than you thought possible. Let’s examine sales through the lens of the key themes of Beckett’s masterpiece.
Nothing to be done
The catchphrase becomes a recurring theme throughout the play. Everything becomes futile. No point in doing anything different.
Like many sales leaders, I have sat on literally hundreds of forecast calls “Waiting for Godot”. That deal that was “about to close” seemingly “with everything done”, even a signatory date in the line of sight. I’ve seen sales people then go into suspended animation at this point; their focus on everything else gone. It feels like you’re a person down as all other activity stops.
A static world where nothing happens
In this world of suspended animation, prospecting and indeed, every other part of the sales process, have, at this point, ceased. Our intrepid sales person is trapped in a world of their own making, going through the motions each day, counting the days down until “it” gets signed. Like the drama, there is a loss of structure; of meaning. The day arrives and of course the deal doesn’t get signed. It’s “slipped” or on some occasions “gone away”. I saw one deal (in somebody else’s team) slip for 5 consecutive quarters. The name “Wincanton” became synonymous with “slippage”.
The ramifications of course are horrific. Almost certainly, the slipped deal would have been committed. It will have a blown a huge hole in the individual’s forecast, leaving those above in the chain with a gaping gap that even a spot of commercial jiggery pokery just won’t cover.
Those immortal words, dragged from a 1990 unreconstructured, Glengarry Glenn Ross, VP of Sales type figure are sure to be heard: “How are you going to cover it?” Well, at 1600 on the last day of the quarter, I probably won’t. (As a footnote, I once had a “manager” in a large US Technology Provider whose favourite film is Glengarry Glen Ross. Of course it is. My suspicions of me not being an alpha male were confirmed when I disclosed that my favourite film was The Unbearable Lightness of Being which caused consternation by the true alphas in the room. The conversation shuddered to an abrupt halt when I explained that the book, by Milan Kundera, was even better).
There is no future just a repetitive present
I’ve written in previous blogs how hard sales has been during the pandemic. Every day feels the same. There is an over reliance on video based technology. Deal progress is harder than it has ever been. Senior Sales Leaders are feeling twitched and some (those that aren’t very good) rely on unending KPIs and not a lot else. (I love a good KPI as much as the next person, you understand, but not in the absence of motivating your team).
Even pretending to see the future is difficult at the present time. (Isn’t it refreshing to see the Futurists vanish from LinkedIn overnight? Apparently, they never saw the pandemic coming. Ouch!)
For the purists, true existentialism is difficult to achieve when you are in lockdown. However, when everyone is paddling the same canoe as we are at the present time, it is possible to break out and do something different. Personal liberty may be in short supply, but you still have the opportunity to develop; become stronger if you will. Put simply though, you need to do something different out of the regular mode if you are to achieve this.
Time loses meaning as the same actions are repeated each day
There are some principles of sales that will be forever thus regardless of the prevailing macro environment. We know this. However, show me many a sales organisation and I will almost certainly highlight to you that these basic tenets are either poorly executed or don’t exist at all.
Having a well implemented CRM, tightly integrated with a Marketing Automation application, underpinned by world beating analytics (imagine that right now?!), coupled with a social selling model is all very well, but it becomes largely redundant if your sales people are doing more or less the same as they were in February. For the farmers in large Enterprise Accounts backed by a large US software firm, life maybe hard, but it’s good. For the rest, the majority, it isn’t and you need to think and act differently. It is incredibly easy to be lulled into a daily monotonous, stupefying routine working hard and achieving little.
I am still seeing contact strategies that remain pretty poor. There is an over reliance on manufactured, written corporate communication with people still trying to connect and sell something at the same time. If you do this, you are interrupting me or spamming me. I delete it , just like I do the 30 emails that appear in my hotmail junk every day. Equally, I don’t like (or indeed read) bland, perfectly branded online corporate brochures that are posted.
Similarly, “go to markets” remain consistently poor. The info graphics are great; the content generally banal and value free. Did you ever make a significant purchase from a 2 page brochure or white paper with no demonstrable value? Guess what? Neither do your prospects!
Make yourself stand out. Demonstrate value to your targets that is appropriate to the challenges that they face. Don’t, as one keen LinkedIner did at the start of the last lockdown ask me about my travel preferences as they connected and then followed up with “help” for my next holiday!
It is a pre-requisite to understand issues, challenges and drivers then build a value statement that individually addresses them.
A daily diary full of video calls demonstrates effort and application, but it doesn’t allow for thinking time or for building alternative strategies now the world has changed. You need to block out time to do this. Preferably every day.
Finally, change your days. Now is the time to really structure what you do, but to enable some spontaneity and a dynamic approach to adapt to the ever changing environment in which we operate. The key to remaining fresh whilst trapped in the same home office is to make each day different from the rest.
Lack of coherent communication
In the play Estragon and Vladimir speak to each other in an odd way that is lacking in structure, lacking in logic and at times becomes rather meaningless. In our current situation, with the absence of the office, communication has understandably suffered, even with the omnipresence of video calls. Despite vastly improved etiquette, and use of additional tools to present idea generation, there is still no true meaningful substitute for F2F meetings unfortunately. I am seeing communication becoming stilted and ineffective. It’s becoming difficult to get things done.
We need to communicate very carefully and in the absence of F2F meetings, we need some structure but having each of our days mandated from the start is neither healthy nor productive. We must keep some time aside for free form calls. You know the ones I mean – look up a contact on your smart phone and just call them, even when the call isn’t in the diary! Woo hoo!
The world may well have changed its axis for now at least, but the principles of sales remain the same. We accept that those who are pragmatic with a drive to do things differently will succeed as I have suggested. Repeating the same mistakes as before and expecting a different outcome is indeed madness.
There is an important point to remember. However low we feel right now, we are in this together, just like Estragon and Vladimir. We have the same shared sense of hell. The difference though is that we don’t succumb to their hopelessness.
“Waiting for Godot reflects and reveals our concerns back to us. It’s a little depressing to realize that humanity has changed not a bit I suppose, but there’s also perhaps a small bit of hope in seeing that we’re never exactly alone.” Shannon Reed NY Times 2017.
DWSL provide Sales Transformation for your existing organisation or due diligence for one you are considering investing in. Using our structured methodology we quickly identify inhibitors to growth and work with you to deliver a prescribed plan of actions to enable you to be best in class.
