Selling With Noble Purpose. Lisa Earle McLeod
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the questions are about when and how we're going to collect revenue from the customer. These questions matter, but they aren't enough to create any kind of differentiated conversation (internally or externally).
Very few managers ask about the impact the sale will have on the customer's business or life.
We expect salespeople to focus on customers' needs and goals when they're in front of customers, but the majority of internal conversations are about the organization's own revenue quotas.
Although it's an unintended disconnect, it's a fatal one.
Unfortunately, the current sales narrative of most organizations is flawed, fatally out of sync with what really matters to salespeople and customers. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff articulates the transactional mindset that so many sales teams used to embody, describing it this way: “If you were meeting with a customer, your singular goal was to leave the room with a signed contract—in as short a time as possible.”
Benioff points out the flaw in this approach, writing in his book Trailblazer: “It didn't incentivize anyone to consider whether the customers on the other side of these transactions really needed the software or whether it helped them make progress on their business goals.”
In a traditional sales organization, the entire ecosystem surrounding the sales team—the customer relationship management (CRM) system, weekly sales meetings, conversations with managers, recognition, and everything else that influences seller behavior—are all pointed toward targets.
It's assumed that sellers will focus on customers when they're interacting with customers. But are we surprised when they don't? Everything in the ecosystem is driving them toward thinking about nothing but their own quota.
Most organizations want to have a positive impact on their customers' lives. It makes good business sense, and it appeals to our more noble instincts. Yet when managers are caught up inside the pressure cooker of daily business, their desire to improve the customer's life is eclipsed by quotas, quarterly numbers, and daily sales reports.
This results in salespeople who don't have any sense of a higher purpose other than “making the numbers.” It sounds fine enough in theory, but customers can tell the difference between the salespeople who care about them and those who care only about their bonuses. Sales targets are important, but they don't create a compelling narrative.
The great disconnect between what we want salespeople to do when they're in the field (focus on the customer) versus what we emphasize and reinforce internally (our own targets and quotas) results in mediocre sales performance.
What Lack of Purpose Costs a Sales Force
When the customer becomes nothing more than a number to you, you become nothing more than a number to the customer—and your entire organization suffers.
When you overemphasize financial goals at the expense of how you make a difference to customers, you make it extremely difficult for your salespeople to differentiate themselves from the competition. And the problem doesn't stop there. It has a ripple effect, causing salespeople who:
Think only about the short term
Fail to understand the customer's environment
Cannot connect the dots between your products and customers' goals
Cannot gain access to senior levels within the customer
Then the problem escalates:
Customers view you as a commodity.
You have little or no collaboration with them.
Customers place undue emphasis on minor problems.
Contracts are constantly in jeopardy over small dollar amounts.
Salespeople's default response is to lower the price.
Sales has a negative perception in the rest of the organization.
Top performers become mid‐level performers.
Salespeople view their fellow salespeople as the competition.
Customer churn increases.
Salespeople try to game the comp plan.
Sales force morale declines.
It's not a pretty picture. When the internal conversation is all about money, the external conversation becomes all about money. And all of a sudden, that's the last thing you're making.
Companies have tried a variety of methods to solve this problem. Organizations spend millions on sales training programs teaching salespeople how to ask better questions and engage the customers. They spend even more millions on CRM systems to capture critical customer information. They host off‐site retreats to create mission and vision statements. They hire expensive consultants to craft lengthy slide decks articulating their value proposition.
The results are short‐lived at best. Salespeople abandon the training the minute a high‐stakes deal is on the table. No one updates the customer intel in CRM. The mission and vision are put on a meaningless placard in the lobby. And the value story is reduced to a bunch of pretty slides that sound just like everyone else's.
The reason these solutions don't deliver sustained improvement is because they address only the symptoms. They don't tackle the root cause: the lack of purpose.
Peter Drucker, widely considered the most influential management thinker in the second half of the twentieth century, famously said, “Profit is not the purpose of a business but rather the test of its validity.”
I'll take that a step further: Driving revenue is not the purpose of a sales force; it's the test of its effectiveness.
If you want to create a differentiated sales team, you have to point them toward a different target. Instead of pointing your team toward a number, which is likely what your competition is doing, point your team toward a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP).
A Noble Sales Purpose is a definitive statement about how you make a difference in the lives of your customers. It speaks to why you're in business in the first place. Used correctly, your NSP drives every decision you make and every action you take. It becomes the underpinning for all your sales activities.
For example, one of our clients provides IT services for small businesses. Their NSP is simply, “We help small businesses be more successful.” It's not elaborate or sexy or poetic. Instead, it's clear and effective. It drives everything they do. Every decision, large or small, must pass through that filter: “Will this help us make small businesses more successful?” If the answer is no, they don't do it. Every new product and service they create—every sales call—is focused on how they can make their customers' small businesses more successful. You'll read more about how this team used their NSP to drive a decade worth of growth later in the book.
For now, notice how this simple statement goes beyond the standard value proposition or product description. It doesn't include “and our community” or “through our values like integrity and hard work” or anything like that. It's simple. And clear. That's why it works.
Their NSP describes the impact they aim to have on customers. It serves as the North Star for the organization.
The leadership team first began implementing their NSP in 2009, during the height of the recession. In a tough economy, when customers were cutting back on outside IT services, the NSP approach helped the company post double‐digit sales growth. While other firms were descending into