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Summary: As sales professionals we self-assess the effectiveness of the sales techniques we employ. However, relying solely on self observation may be damaging your sales efforts and you don’t even know it.

A man is fishing alone in the middle of the ocean and his boat starts to leak. His boat quickly sinks and he is forced to tread water. Unfortunately he has no life preserver or lifeboat. He can’t see land so he doesn’t even know which way to swim. He is really in trouble.

Suddenly a dolphin appears and starts pushing him rapidly through the water. After pushing the fisherman through the water for almost two hours a shoreline appears. The next thing the man knows he’s standing on the beach…alive. “The benevolent dolphin saved me!” he exclaims. “He pushed me to the safety of the shore!” The dolphin did save the man, but was the dolphin really doing it because he is a friend of all mankind? Read on.

What about other helpless fishermen this same dolphin may have pushed further out to sea? We can’t know if the dolphin was benevolent or not because those other fishermen, who weren’t so lucky, were never heard from again. The rescued fisherman in this story has no further data about the dolphin and its intentions other than what he has just observed.

Sometimes we do the same thing in sales. We try a new sales technique that gets good results and we believe we have just found a great new sales tool for our arsenal. We think, “Wow, I’m going to use that technique on all of my customers.” If we believe a sales technique is effective - even though it may not be - we will usually continue to use it. We are unable to see that our faith may be misplaced.

I worked with a salesperson who would always take exactly 24 donuts on the first call to a prospect. He told me that it helped him close a big deal once. From my observations I think this practice actually offended most of his prospects because it came across as childishly manipulative. His benevolent dolphin was in fact pushing him into deeper water and he didn’t know it.

Can we make an objective decision about the efficacy of our sales techniques from one or two self observations? Can we know that it was our sales skills that landed us that big order? Or was it because the prospect was completely out of our product and their assembly line was about to shut down? Even if your sales levels are good, could they be even better if you stripped out unproductive sales tactics that you erroneously believe are working to your benefit?

By welcoming and soliciting input from your sales manager and peers you can be more confident about your sales techniques. In addition to getting feedback from other sales professionals you can take advantage of the vast amounts of sales training and materials that are available to you from inside and outside your company. We need to look outside of ourselves to objectively hone our sales skills.

Have you made friends with a benevolent dolphin that may be pushing you out to sea?

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Tags: skills

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