The Paradoxes of Sales

The Paradoxes of Sales

Near as I can figure, there are three kinds of paradoxes.

First is the kind of card trick or three card Monty type of paradox. They look like there is something wrong, but until you figure out just what it is, it seems a little maddening. The classic example is Zeno’s paradox.

Then there is the true logical conundrum; something that represents a true dilemma in the way we perceive reality or logic itself. “This statement is false” Is the classic of this genre. (The Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty feels like one of these to me, but I’m no physicist or logician.)

Finally, there are what I’ll call the human-interest paradoxes – situations where things that seem the most logical or intuitive produce the opposite or unexpected results or insights. They often share something in common with jokes – they rest on different meanings, or meanings at a different level, of the same words.

“We are never so alone as in the middle of a crowd,” is one example. The Socratic quote, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing,” is a slightly more profound instance. More whimsical is the Beatles’ “The love you take is equal to the love you make,” from Abbey Road.  Or, one of my faves, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

Such paradoxes are usually witty, often appear trivial, yet often reveal some higher level of truth. The field of sales offers several such paradoxes. I think this is because sales is a fertile ground for confusion of several levels and aspects of the human experience. Let’s explore just a few.

  1. “The best way to sell is to stop selling.”

Everybody likes to buy; nobody wants to be sold. There’s a reason that “sales” is consistently rated one of the least trusted professions; salespeople get ranked low in honesty and high in perceived selfishness. Spamming, qualifying, and “hard sell” closing are among techniques lampooned in popular culture in movies like Glengarry Glen Ross.

  1. “The best road to short-term sales results is to focus on the long-term.”

Most people easily recognize that a long-term strategy is superior to one that changes frequently. Yet those same people don’t see that spiffs, specials and end-of-quarter sales promotions send the same signal – that the seller is motivated purely by self-interest.  This gives the lie to any buyer-focused message the seller might wish to send. And just as with strategy, a long-term success is made up of successive short-term intervals; the superior long term is almost by definition made up of superior short-terms.

  1. “The most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” [credit to George Burns]

Of course, you can’t fake sincerity. Nor can you fake genuine concern for the customer or client. The only way to appear sincerely concerned is to be sincerely concerned. How you get there is non-trivial, but it doesn’t change the truth of that statement.

  1. “The best way to get what you want is to help the other person get what they want.” [loosely derived from Dale Carnegie]

The fundamentality of the Principle of Reciprocity was recognized decades ago by Robert Cialdini (and felt intuitively by people for millennia). It is as old as the handshake, a social gesture of reciprocal good intent.  And it is as relevant today in negotiation strategy and game theory (see tit-for-tat). People are deeply programmed toward reciprocity.

  1. “If your goal is the sale, you have already lost. Let the sale be a happy byproduct of a larger goal – helping the customer.”

This paradox gets to the very heart of sales. As commonly understood, Sales is flawed at the very basic level of goals and objectives.

We like to think that being goal-oriented is a plus for salespeople. But if their goal is built around getting a sale, then it is intuitively obvious to the customer that the salesperson’s goal is self-oriented – indeed, downright selfish. All claims to be buyer-centric, customer-centric, or customer-oriented are felt and seen to be a hypocritical lie.

Perhaps this suggests a Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty for sales. The more you focus on This Transaction, the more you reduce the likelihood of future sales from all sources; the more you focus on always doing right by all customers, the more you increase the odds of getting this sale.  You just must detach from the outcome of any particular sale.

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