The Problem with Wanting Sales to Be Easy

Some people want sales to be easy. They want more and better sales without putting forth the effort necessary to acquire clients and opportunities. Many of them believe that their business should run like Amazon.com, with them offering a product or service or solution, and people clicking to buy what they sell, an idea that works well for some transactional sales, but performs poorly when their target clients need help (and even Amazon has salespeople for AWS, their biggest money-maker).

Entrepreneurs spend their time seeking a technological solution to a problem that isn’t easily solved through technology. They spend their time looking for a go-to-market strategy that eliminates the need for salespeople, a part of the business they see as a cost, and one they have no idea how to engage and manage effectively. Because they believe so deeply in their offering, they suffer from the delusion that their target market will immediately recognize the value and buy from them, a rare occurrence. By trying to make selling easy, they make obtaining clients and opportunities more difficult.

Salespeople and some of their leaders believe they can pitch everyone and win new business, and there is a growing cottage industry on LinkedIn of salespeople who are taught and trained to write a four-paragraph pitch with a link to their calendar to strangers, without targeting, and without any indication that the person might be right for their service or solution (I know this because I receive sales training and development offers, as well as appointment-setting services pitched to me every day).

It’s easy to increase your activity by pitching more people faster, and you can deceive yourself into believing that you are efficient. Efficiency is measured by the energy expended to produce a specific result, not the elimination of effort and energy without a result. To believe that you are efficient when you try to make selling easy, you have to refuse to look at the wasted energy and effort.

Most of the effort expended in trying to make selling easier would be better spent in increasing your effectiveness.