About Instruments and Instincts

“The vision was so near, it was so real

Fata Morgana played her game.”

from The Wondrous World of Punt by Therion

When sailing at night or through a fog, human instincts and intuitions are often misleading. Hence, trust your instruments.

A fata morgana, or mirage, may suggest water in the desert, an island on the horizon, or a Flying Dutchman, none of which are really there. Hence, trust your instruments.

And as a pilot, you learn to trust your instruments: IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) – the process that governs aircraft that fly in instrument meteorological conditions, aka flying in the clouds.

So how about in Sales? Is gut instinct a fata morgana? Is reading between the lines misleading? Is intuition fogging the facts? Many salespeople pride themselves on having a sixth sense when it comes to their ability to understand customers and close deals.

Nicole Peeler seems to agree and suggests to “never trust the process. Instead, trust what you can control. Your butt in a chair. Your fingers on a keyboard. Your ability to take criticism and learn from it, either to grow, to modify your approach, or even to realize when you’re legitimately chasing your tail.”

In several articles, I have praised the value of statistics, systems, and processes and labeled them as essential foundations for a successful sales team. And I equally believe in the human powers of being able to abstract using intuition and to receive information not gained through the recognized senses (or the sixth sense).

Let me describe a situation where both come to play, and both contribute to success. Or as Jeffrey Gitomer describes it: “Making sense out of sales, and sales out of sense.”

Within a business, an individual sales opportunity can be evaluated against all other past and current opportunities, those lost and those won: Metrics like contract value, length of the sales cycle, stage duration, customer type, … Relative to other opportunities, these metrics allow us to estimate the close probability. Not as a guesstimate, but rather with statistical probability.

Most non-transactional sales require multiple conversations between the salesperson and the client. They often involve words or statements coming from the client that seem to be reoccurring from sale to sale: phrases like "I do not have a budget," "my boss is traveling," "the topic dropped from the agenda," or "we really like your product." The salesperson now needs to use experience and intuition to look beyond the literal meaning of the words spoken. What do those words really mean for the sales opportunity at hand?

The combination of intuition and data, sometimes aligned and sometimes not, provides the best visibility.

Great Sales Leaders understand this. Talk to us to find out how we can help.

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Nicole Peeler – Don't Trust the Process

Jeffrey Gitomer – Making sense out of sales, and sales out of sense

Photo by Franzisko Hauser