USA and France played 2 amazing basketball games this weekend– the men’s final on Saturday and the women’s on Sunday, As a basketball fan, it’s great to see the games get competitive, with amazing players from all over the world.
My basketball fixation aside, one fascinating aspect of the Olympics is the notion of “degree of difficulty”– your score gets multiplied by the degree of difficulty, pushing athletes to complete more challenging feats, because otherwise they can’t possibly score high enough to win. This pressure may seem familiar to “type A” students– where GPAs get adjusted by the level of the course.
Many of us seek out high degree of difficulty client engagements– otherwise we’re bored.
But when it comes to sales and marketing, the last thing I want is higher degree of difficulty. I want the wide-open slam dunk.
Increasing the degree of difficulty in sales:
- Makes it harder to create content that will attract the right people, forcing more reliance on your sales and marketing efforts. (Yuck!)
- Make it more likely that introductions and referrals are not great fits, meaning you need to answer more questions and objections, wasting more time on people who aren’t the right fit for you.
- Even worse, you may end up using lots of time and energy to “successfully” convert someone who is not the right fit– now you have a bad client, which sucks up time and energy.
- Even with prospects who match your ideal client profile, you have to answer more questions because it’s not obvious to them that you are exactly what they’ve been seeking.
Instead of your results getting multiplied by the degree of difficulty, they get divided by the degree of difficulty.
The immediate metaphor would be Simone Biles winning gold by simply walking across the mat, but that’s not really right. The real analogy is that she walks into the gym, instead of hitchhiking from her hotel, swimming across the river, breaking into the gym via a 4th story window, and then realizing she broke into the water polo facility and trying to play water polo.
Save the heroics for the actual (ideal) client work. Make everything as easy as possible up to that point.
So, make sure you’ve got a good answer for step 1 of the 2-step sales process.
- figure out exactly who you want to talk to <– lower the degree of difficulty here
- talk to them <— use this if step 1 is hard
Save the Olympics for the Olympians (that’s you, when you’re working with your clients, btw).