Stop Selling and Start Growing: Six keys to undoing sales aversion

One of the most counterproductive words in the English language has to be sales. It conveys almost exactly the opposite of what it is intended in both intellect and emotion.

Consider this definition provided by Merriam-Webster, Selling: to deliver or give up in violation of duty, trust, or loyalty.

My first professional career was in membership sales. I won every award and hated every minute. Despite every sales training seminar imaginable, I loathed being a sales person.   I had been conditioned to see sales as a career occupied by lower life forms, probably invertebrates.  It wasn’t until I was taught to invert the process that EVERYTHING CHANGED. Inverting the sales process is about looking for a “few good members”.  It is about realizing that the seller has more to lose than to gain in every exchange.  The your whole purpose of this “sales process” is to ensure that you exceed the expectations of your member or you will pay the ultimate price.  Daniel Pink has written about this extensively in To Sell is Human but the extent to which our aversion to the word sales cannot be over estimated.

Membership implies a covenant, not just between the NonProfit and its members, but between the members and each other. The only way you can serve your members well is if they serve each other. Nonprofits simply provide the vehicle for members to serve each other. Communicating this symbiotic relationship is crucial to the entire nonprofit value proposition.  Members are both the “customer” and the “product”.

Ask yourself if the member does no more than pay their annual dues are they a benefit or liability to the organization?

In the sixteen years we have been in the nonprofit industry I have not seen a single business model where the cost of serving a member does not exceed the dues paid.  In the past one of the value added contributions a member could make was through their expertise.   That is still true with one caveat.  Expertise alone is of little value if it is not provided by a “trusted” adviser.    In the past we needed experts to provide information.  Now information is ubiquitous.  I can find the answer to almost any question with a few keystrokes and those answers do not typically come from the service provider themselves.  I tend to trust those who have no affiliation to the company and therefore no ulterior motives to sharing their solutions.  So the real value any Nonprofit provides is not in the education they provide but in the conversations they create. Conversations create trust, trust creates relationships, relationships create value and value creates sustainability.  The problem is that many Nonprofits are still designed around delivering content instead of stimulating conversations.  Content is easy, conversations are hard.  I like the way my new UK friend expresses our attachment to successful insignificance instead of floundering (at first) at the important but unfamiliar.

The greatest challenge is not what is in our heads, but what is in our hearts.  Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick wrote, “The reality of a thing is not the think of a thing, it is the feel of a thing.” The problem with most sales and service training is first that we try to separate the two; they are inseparable. And second that we treat the

challenge as one of changing behaviors when it is one of changing beliefs. All the intellectual understanding in the world is of little value without the belief that it is not only possible, but also desirable.   It matters very little that sales is measured, required, insisted upon, “trained how to” or incentified if we do not believe in it ourselves.

We resist in direct proportion to the extent in which others insist.

The good news is that underneath all of our misunderstanding and confusion, effective service generates sales. It is something we all want to achieve, and more importantly, something we have already done. Thousands and thousands of times we have all done the things great sales people do, the difference is we never called it sales. We called it courting, helping, educating, coaching, enlisting, communicating, parenting or a thousand other things that we believe are worthwhile, noble or necessary.  These things weren’t often easy, we seldom knew just what to do, no one required us to do them, but we did them anyway.  The question becomes would we have done them better if we called them sales?

Six Actionable ideas

1. Realize that what we are doing is not working.  Despite countless efforts to train sales/service skills, the results have been unpredictable, unsustainable, and less than extraordinary.

2. Aversion to the “sales process” is the norm, turnover a constant, and the few bright spots are the result of incredible genetics, fabulous parenting or the inspiration of desperate circumstance.

3. The characteristics we want most from the ideal “Salesperson” are demonstrated best by children. Enthusiasm, persistence, resilience are a natural part of who we are before we become what Juan Miguel Ruiz described in The Four Agreements as “domesticated”. As children, failure was just part of the natural progression to success. Everyday was such a new adventure we had no time for regrets about the past worries about the future or distracting ourselves with the misfortune of others. We were “in the moment”.

4. Our misunderstandings about the sales processes are so powerful we must train specific language to reverse the roles of buyer and seller. We must understand that everyone is not a good member, and why; why selecting the wrong member is a lose-lose situation.

5. EVERYONE is a salesperson!!! Therefore everyone must be given the authority, autonomy, training and tools to serve your members by helping them understand how they serve each other.

6. Measure your progress. Share the results graphically. Celebrate your successes and incorporate the lessons.