Sorry, you're a sales rep
Hey – Rob here.
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With that out of the way, let's get into something I've been thinking about.
I'm about to deliver a talk with the smart team at a small creative agency, who are struggling not with doing strategy, but with selling it to clients.
And my opening slide couldn't be more of a downer: I basically will insult them by saying they are all, and always have been, sales representatives.
But is it an insult? I don't think so. Or at least it shouldn't feel like it.
You see, a bit like you I always thought "sales" and "politics" were not my thing. My thing is strategy and strategy is pure while those things are not.
And then I read Dan Pink's 'To Sell Is Human' and eventually stopped having my head so up my own ass, and completely changed my mind.
Of course, we need to qualify what we mean by "sales" and "politics" here. Your job isn't to just do them. It's to use them to land your thinking.
So if your job as a strategist is to sell but you don't have a P&L, sales target or profit margin target attached to your job role, what do you sell?
You sell ways of thinking
You sell ways of working
You sell arguments
You sell ideas
You sell simplicity
You sell leaps
You sell the need to act
You sell the need to do nothing (yes, sometimes this is the job!)
This may sound obvious but I think it's an important reframe, especially if we're still under the assumption that our role is to bring "the smart bits".
Reality check. Our job isn't to sound smart, it's to help others be smart. We help them be smart by convincing them and their colleagues to do things.
And we only convince them to do things if we – you guessed it – learn how to sell and use politics to our advantage (instead of them using you).
This week I wanted to introduce this simple idea. Next week, I'll go a bit deeper into some techniques I find useful to sell the strategies I write.
You won't find it surprising that a big part of it is what our job has always been about: thinking about what motivates your (internal) customer to buy.
But for now, my word of advice is to get comfortable with the idea that yes, your job is strategy, but that by default means you're also in sales.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to grab my suitcase because I'll be on the road for a few days, up and down the country, selling slides door to door.
Keep swimming,
Rob
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