The process of convincing someone to buy and use your product needs to respect the customer, needs to understand their needs at different points of the user experience. You can’t just shout your top ten features at people in a billboard and a website and packaging just like you can’t simply hand someone your résumé at an interview, then lunch, then on a date. Sure, you’re giving them important information, but different moments in the journey

require different approaches.

Your message needs to fit the customer’s context. You can’t say everything everywhere.

Find people who are good human beings in addition to being good at sales. Find people

who will care about your mission and be thrilled with the vital role they’ll play in making it a reality.

It might not be easy. Especially if there’s a ton of competition for talent. There are situations and industries where building a whole new sales culture and organization just isn’t feasible. In that case, you just need one. Find a sales leader who understands and values customer relationships—someone who won’t stand for egoism or cutthroat competition and who won’t hire assholes or mercenaries. That leader will shape the culture of their organization to be more relationship-oriented, until the world catches up to what you’re doing and you can implement vested commissions.

These people exist. They’re tired of transactional cultures, too. They want to do right by their customers. They want to feel like part of a real team. Hire them.

Customer education—providing an audience with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to become an informed buyer—is one of the most important parts of a sales cycle. Too often we’re so close to what we’re selling that we assume others are also experts on it, or know what we know, but most of the time that’s not the case. Customers don’t always know what they don’t know, or don’t know enough about something to realize how useful or beneficial that information could be to them or their own business.

Over the years, I have frequently counseled people who wanted better jobs to show more initiative—to take interest and aptitude tests, to study the industry, even the specific problems the organizations they are interested in are facing, and then to develop an effective presentation showing how their abilities can help solve the organization’s problem. It’s called “solution selling,” and is a key paradigm in business success. The response is usually agreement—most people can see how powerfully such an approach would affect their opportunities for employment or advancement. But many of them fail to take the necessary steps, the initiative, to make it happen.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood - principles of Empathic Communication

“Suppose you’ve been having trouble with your eyes and you decide to go to an optometrist for help. After briefly listening to your complaint, he takes off his glasses and hands them to you. “Put these on,” he says. “I’ve worn this pair of glasses for ten years now and they’ve really helped me. I have an extra pair at home; you can wear these.” So you put them on, but it only makes the problem worse.

“This is terrible!” you exclaim. “I can’t see a thing!”

“Well, what’s wrong?” he asks. “They work great for me. Try harder.”

“I am trying,” you insist. “Everything is a blur.”

“Well, what’s the matter with you? Think positively.”

“Okay. I positively can’t see a thing.”

“Boy, are you ungrateful!” he chides. “And after all I’ve done to help you!”

What are the chances you’d go back to that optometrist the next time you needed help? Not very good, I would imagine. You don’t have much confidence in someone who doesn’t diagnose before he or she prescribes.