#162: Sales, Marriage, Near-Death And Life
Good morning, dear friends
Before we start today, join me in congratulating Nthabi Kekana who this month becomes the third, and youngest artist to date, to participate in the Makwande Art Residency in France. I love these two works.
/ strategy
I was unhappy with last week’s letter about sales. It took me a while to understand why and now that I have, I must share it with you.
While all the tactics I shared– matching sales operation structure to business life-cycle, creating transparent data-led intelligence systems, using said data to scope micro-markets and identify gaps and areas of momentum, having an easy-to-understand commission structure whilst having sufficient variation to incentivize people at different performance levels, knowing that building an effective sales engine is so much more than beating the target drum, that it is recruitment, training, integrating diverse skill sets, coaching, and culture – are powerful and will make a difference to the effectiveness of your sales operation, what I failed to do was to give you a strategic insight that held it together.
Without that insight, I left you with a basket full of things to do, a useful collection but not enduring, not something you could adapt to your context.
Upon reflection, the insight is this – powerful and effective sales, like all of strategy and personal mastery, require us to see and understand what is real.
We need to strip off the labels that dull our senses, that mislead us into thinking we know what we see when in truth we’re looking at an approximation, a dilution of a deeper truth.
We need to see reality, in all its complexity and contradictions. It is that which gives us insight and enables us to act effectively.
A sales target is almost always expressed in a currency, but underneath that are businesses, people, geographies, sociologies, and psychologies. That is the layer we must see.
Without depth, our strategies are generic, they miss the nuance of our customer’s real needs.
We may define our market as a particular sector, missing that within that sector there are customers that have particular characteristics that buy from us.
Knowing that detail enables us to find customers in other sectors that share those characteristics, or to devise new strategies to widen our reach to the other customers within our sector. We need to see and understand that to design those strategies.
We speak of sales teams, but those teams are made up of people. Those people have different histories and are at different levels of performance. Indeed, in any given week, a high performer may have a low-performance day and vice versa. We need to see that and design and coach accordingly.
You get the idea…and so, the strategy insight comes down to this – pay attention. Or perhaps – reject easy solutions. Or – watch out for easy labels. Or maybe – get the details. Or – action follows insight.
We could put it all together into something like ‘when we use any label to make sense of complexity – a customer segmentation for example – we dull our vision, we lose valuable detail. Remember that reality is always more complex than the map, from time to time, pause, seek the deeper reality, that gives insight and with insight, we can generate possibilities, and from the possibilities we can choose effective actions.
Yes, all of last week’s tactics are powerful. They’re powerful because they force you to engage with the reality of what is.
I think that’s a bit clearer.
/ self
How do you not fall in love with an essay that starts, “I was married ten years ago, on a brazenly warm day in January, from my father’s house, in a dress my mother made, with the same blithe blindness that sends a bungee jumper off a bridge.
I was thirty-four—not a young bride but about right for my narrow slice of the world: baby boomer, middle-class professional, exquisitely self-referential. My kind didn’t marry young. In our twenties, marriage was about as hip as Tupperware parties. Driving around in my parents’ car the day before the wedding, I felt feverish, slightly inauthentic, immensely proud, awkward, and unaware, like a toddler on her maiden voyage as a biped”?
That is how Lynn Darling starts her 1996 essay For Better and Worse. It is an exploration, actually an excavation of marriage written whilst her husband is terminally ill.
She reflects “I married him. And then I thought, Now what? I didn’t know this story. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. The plots available to us are so thin: We were happy until. . . she got the promotion, he met the other woman, the children went into detox. The stories that end happily are thinner still”.
Thin stories do not give us the richness we need to navigate the complexity of life.
Darling gives that to us. She takes us to the heart of their marriage. Its’ joy and its pain.
On their first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, he gave her red towels. She was enraged.
Now, years later, she writes “What I can’t remember anymore is why I was so angry. The reasoning must have been something like this: I have staked everything on this man, and he is not what I thought; he is not the man who cries when he reads Ford Madox Ford. I have defined myself in terms of this choice, this man, and this is the kind of man he is, the Kind Who Gives Towels” and then “I smile now when I remember this story, set back in the phase when marriage is still a mirror, reflecting back only one’s carefully constructed, easily shattered conceit. Now my husband gives me bath towels every Valentine’s Day, and every Valentine’s Day I laugh”.
As she witnesses life fading from her husband she says “Terminal illness and lack of time perform a Khmer Rouge-like obliteration on the dull lacquer of years. There are moments when my husband and I are back in year one, and all the reasons we fell in love are so apparent, the barnacles of grievance and irritation removed so completely, that I become furious with marriage for the way it buries love in the sludge of who takes out the trash, the way routine replaces romance”.
In a sense that is always the challenge, to see what there is beneath the sludge.
/ soul
In George Saunders’ short story, Tenth of December, terminally ill Eber, haunted by memories of his stepfather’s death, fearful that as he too dies, he will become someone who lashes out and burdens his loved ones, is intent on killing himself.
He ends up living. Indeed, he saves another’s life and, in the process, comes close to the death that he wanted before he too is saved.
As he neared death he reflected, “He’d been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and the bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, now saw that that there could be many – many drops of goodness, is how it came to him – many drops of happy – of good fellowship – ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not – had never been – his to withhold”.
We forget this. Often.
Asking for help, needing help, gives others a chance to love us.
Self-sufficiency has its place, but it can be selfish. It is an act of generosity to allow others to help.
His wife is called by his rescuer, “She came in flustered and apologetic, a touch of anger in her face. He’d embarrassed her. He saw that. He’d embarrassed her by doing something that showed she hadn’t sufficiently noticed him needing her. She’d been too busy nursing him to notice how scared he was.”
How often isn’t that true?
We’re so busy helping that we miss what is there, just beneath the surface. It’s not right. It’s not wrong. It just is. It happens. But we can be aware, we can know that we will always miss things whether it is in sales, or marriage, or care, or how we see ourselves and others. It helps to slow down and be curious about what it might be.
I wish you a week of discovery.
Much love
Karl
PS: I am a coach. You can learn more about how I work here. If you’d like to know what my clients enjoy about working with me check out the recommendations on my LinkedIn page,