This weekend I finally got a chance to watch some of the Paris Olympics. (Amazing drama, especially in the men’s 100m dash.) While I enjoyed watching and listening to some of the expert commentary, I realized that it’s easy to draw the wrong inspiration from the best athletes on the planet.
This seemed particularly salient when watching Simone Biles on the vault. (Watch this on YouTube— NBC won’t let me embed it– if you haven’t already watched this.) Not only can I not do this stuff, I would likely die or seriously injure myself even attempting it. I can run a 100m dash– much slower than the Olympians, but I can do it. I can shoot a basketball, much worse than the Olympians, but I can do it. Etc. But this stuff would likely end in paralysis, at best.
If I wanted to take inspiration from the Olympic gymnasts, it should be about stretching and basic strength training, not trying to emulate their routines.
While I did get hyped up watching all these amazing athletes, I also managed to get in a little unexpected pickleball over the weekend, too. I’ve played a handful of times, and it’s all the fun people say it is, but I was playing against more experienced opponents. There’s a lot of technique and strategy involved. What was the most important strategic move for me? Trying to not hit the ball out of bounds.
It’s easy for me to see this now, but for years I thought I should try to copy the Olympians. When I was a sales and marketing consultant for Fortune 500 companies, I figured I had the answer to my sales and marketing challenge right in front of me: I was getting paid to be in the room with some of the top sales and marketing minds on the planet. All I had to do was copy what I was helping them do.
Looking back, and looking at the Olympics, it’s obvious how foolish this plan was. It would be like me doing video editing for Simone Biles and thinking that answer to my fitness challenges would be trying to copy Biles.
A business book I read years ago (and which I can’t pull up, despite my best Google efforts) talked about the difference between beginners and experts. Beginner tennis players describe how to serve in perhaps 6 steps. World-class players use over 50 steps. So if we want to serve well, surely we should pay attention to the 50 step process, right?
But if we’re a beginner, we’re going to get lost in the 50 steps. Most of them probably won’t even make sense to us as a beginner. We’re at my level in pickleball: just don’t hit the ball out of bounds.
The same thing applies in business development. I was helping companies with hundreds, sometimes thousands of sales reps, millions, sometimes billions of dollars of marketing budget. They had elaborate criteria for converting “marketing qualified leads” into “sales qualified leads”. They had ritualized sales meetings reviewing 20 point checklists for moving “opportunities” from one stage of an 8-step sales “pipeline” to the next. There’s nothing wrong with this approach– it’s great, in fact– if you’re running a huge sales team for a public company.
Just like Biles’ training regimen and gymnastic routine is great if you’re the gymnastics G.O.A.T., but it would result in catastrophe for me.
When I tried to implement dozens of CRMs in my own business, each time thinking that I had found the answer– a slightly less complex system that would help me get (and keep) a handle on my business development efforts.
But I was trying to fly a space shuttle, or a 747 to the grocery store.
And while I used lots of sophisticated tools in my client engagements (naturally, I even built custom software because the multimillion dollar systems my clients had already purchased couldn’t do the kinds of analysis we wanted to do), I wasn’t prepared to use enterprise-grade CRMs.
(I learned the hard way when I tried to get my clients to use my tools themselves. They didn’t want to be bothered. They wanted me to use the tools and put the results in a report for them. You’d think I could have applied this to my own efforts to use tools far beyond my expertise in other parts of my business.)
So if you’ve been overwhelmed with sales and marketing advice and you keep finding amazing “experts” with more and more sophisticated systems that seem to leave you frustrated, let’s take it back to the basics. Let’s let Simone Biles do her thing, while we focus on not hitting the ball out of bounds. (For most of us solo consultants, hitting the ball out of bounds is the equivalent of not following up.)
If you’re in a relationship business, you’re in a conversation business.
And if you’re in a conversation business, here’s your sales process:
- Figure out exactly who you want to talk to.
- Talk to them.
(Repeat.)
If you do those things, good things will happen.
If you’re struggling, I promise it’s because you are not doing one or both of them.
And if you want to see how you can use a simple, “anti-CRM” to help you, without overwhelming you with unnecessary detail, join my webinar on August 8 at 2CT: Get Started & Get Organized with CRM for Indie Consultants, Coaches, and Fractionals. Let the Olympians do their thing. You do your superhuman feats when helping your clients. Let’s keep the sales and marketing simple, effective, sustainable, and fun.