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The Comp System Made Me Do It (Be a Low Trust Advisor)

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It happened again the other day.

A (fairly articulate) participant in one of my workshops said:

Charlie, you don’t understand our system. We can’t do the trust stuff you suggest when the incentive system is set up the way it is. We get paid on the basis of the transactions we bring in and close; we are incentivized to focus on the next deal, and to maximize our individual contributions. While no one would call it this exactly, it’s eat what you kill and kill what you eat. You can’t ask us to behave against our own interests just to be nice.

In fact, until leadership takes this seriously and changes the incentive system, this is really all very high-sounding, but you’re not going to see collaborative, long-term client-focused trust-based behavior around here. Not when it’s in our best interest to behave otherwise.

If you’re nodding your head to that argument, and think it makes sense, listen up – this is for you.

That thinking is dead wrong. And not for some ethical or happy-trust-talk reason. It is a misreading of the very incentive system you think you are responding to. If you are buying that line of argument, you are sub-optimizing by shooting yourself in your own foot.

Here’s why.

The Problem is Not the Comp System – It’s You

There’s nothing wrong with a comp system that pays by results, and that apportions pay for accountability. The problem is in you interpreting that system wrongly. You are the one making a hugely false inference, namely:

Believing that the way to optimize short-term performance is to operate from a short-term perspective.

The truth is – and it may be obvious when I put it this way – the real way to optimize short-term performance is to consistently operate with a long-term perspective.

Consider:

  • The company that changes strategy every quarter has no strategy at all;
  • Repeat customers are hugely more profitable than high-churn new customers;
  • We trust people who have our best interests at heart; we distrust those who treat us as one-off transactions.

Let’s connect the dots. If you think that because you get paid by the transaction in short time periods you must behave transactionally or in a short-term timeframe, you are sadly deceiving yourself. You are announcing to your clients – and to your fellow team-members – that you are not interested in long-term relationships, or in doing what’s right for them. Instead, you are focused on maximizing your own short-term financial interest. And they will respond accordingly.

The paradox is – because of your unenlightened focus on the short term, you are actually sub-optimizing your own short term performance. Long term client-focused behavior manifests in an ongoing display of superior short term performance.

A golf metaphor:  don’t focus on hitting the ball – instead, just let the ball get in the way of your swing.

The Solution is not the Comp System – It’s You

One of the great things about trust in business is that it’s far less dependent on top management actions than are other cultural or systemic issues. Trust is very much within range of your own freedom of motion. You do not have to wait for the CEO or the compensation committee – you can act on your own, starting right now.

Resolve to yourself that:

  • You will do what is right for your client’s long-term interests – period;
  • You will treat your partners as if you, and they, will be partners forever;
  • You will do what is long-term right for the firm, not just what is right for you in that moment;
  • You will look at your quarterly performance numbers as a time series – not as a disconnected set of discrete events.

If you do that, here’s what will happen:

  • Your clients will stay with you, refer you to others, stop pushing back on price, ask you about follow-on work, etc.
  • Your colleagues and partners will seek you out, bring you into deals, and help you with your own;
  • Your firm will note that you, as opposed to the Selfish Others, are actually helping the firm.

And most important of all – your income will go up. Not down, up. Because your short term income is maximized if you consistently behave in others’ long-term interest.

Move that gun away from your foot. Now put it away entirely. Doing the right thing pays; not because the world is a happy-talk place, but because in the real world, clients and partners reward those who play the long game – not the short game. And pretty quickly, the short game improves as a result. 

Handling Sales Rejection Without Becoming a Narcissist

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It’s one of the hardest parts of selling—that knife edge space where company revenue stream meets interior personal psychology. It is business, and it is personal.

Most solutions share one problem; they are narcissistic, leading the salesperson to believe it’s all about them.

But it’s not all about you. And the sooner you build that insight into your selling, the better.

This is a topic I wish I had written more about in Trust-based Selling, so I’m glad to amplify it here.

Why Dealing with Rejection Messes You Up

Let’s start with the obvious. If you’re not getting some rejections, you’re probably not taking enough risks. So if you avoid rejection, you’re avoiding risk; which means you’re losing sales.

But that’s not all. If you’re avoiding rejection, on some level you know it. If you know you’re avoiding something, you know you’re not doing what you know you could do; you’re not living up to your own self-image. That soaks up a whole lot of energy; it makes you inward focused and unhappy. None of which helps you as a salesperson.

So avoiding rejection hurts your business, and it makes you feel unhappy. Inability to handle rejection hurts you everywhere it counts.

The Three Usual Solutions to Rejection—and Their Weaknesses

There are three common approaches to dealing with rejection. I’ve given them each distinctive names. They are:

1. Endure it. This approach suggests there is some natural relationship between the numbers of rejections you have to endure to get to the good stuff. If you spin the wheel long enough, your number will come up. Get out there and dial for dollars.

The problem: it’s hard to treat prospects as people if you’re just counting their no’s.

2. Shrink it. This approach says. “It’s not about you, it’s not personal, you shouldn’t feel hurt.” Bring in the shrinks; think your way into not feeling.

The problem: it really is personal, it’s about as personal as it gets–and you know it.

3. Motivate through it. This approach relies on getting you ‘motivated,’ which usually means pumped up, psyched, and able to just play through the pain.

The problem: prospects don’t appreciate being bulldozed.

Why “Handling Rejection” is Narcissistic

All those solutions have one defect: they’re all about managing your psychological response to an issue called “rejection.” But rejection is an imaginary concept—a fiction, a figment of your imagination.

“Rejection” is a belief that if something happened that affected you, then it must have happened to you—that it was about you, concerning you, because of you, etc. And that’s what I’ll refer to as narcissism—a tendency to view everything as being about you.

(Not-so-ancient societies used to believe that the sun and the planets revolved around the earth. There’s a very natural human tendency to believe that we are at the center of our own anthropomorphic universe, our own private Idaho. Much of growing up is getting over this idea, and most of us are only partially successful at it).

Instead of “dealing with rejection” let’s focus on what’s really going on in the real world—the world outside your head.

Curiosity is the Real Antidote to Rejection

Think of selling as a scavenger hunt. On a scavenger hunt, you go off into a relatively unstructured environment, looking for pre-defined items to collect. Of course, you’re interested in winning; but the game itself is fun as well.

In the game, you decide how and where to spend your time. You set priorities, and notice how and what your competitors are doing. There is skill involved in collecting the items. And you often end up in blind alleys when a particular path didn’t pan out for you.

What you don’t feel on a scavenger hunt is rejection. There simply is no such thing. It is not about you; it is just a process involving many people, of whom you are one.

All you need on a scavenger hunt is curiosity. And curiosity is a perfect emotion to bring to sales. Curiosity means you don’t have to ignore your emotions, or play through them, or convince yourself you’re immune to them. Instead, you’re just paying attention to a different set of issues. Let’s call those issues ‘reality.’

In the real world, nothing is being rejected; there are simply solutions and fits, or no-solutions and no-fits. It’s not a struggle–it’s a puzzle. If you’re a good solution to that puzzle and are curious enough, you might solve it. If you’re not a good solution for it, and/or aren’t curious, then you probably won’t.

So where’s ‘rejection’ in all this? In your head. So just stop it.

Three Steps You Can Take to Reject Rejection

1. Make a list of questions you’d like to know about each of your key prospects. Real questions, things you’d really like to learn.

2. Just as you would in a scavenger hunt, keep track of what you’ve learned at each blind alley. You don’t win scavenger hunts sitting back at the office; you learn it going out and finding blind ends.

3. Be alive. Have fun. Keep your ears open. There’s no point in blinding your senses in a scavenger hunt; why blind your emotions in the sales hunt? Just use them to figure out the puzzle.

Did the post-Copernican western world feel “rejected” by the sun when they found out it didn’t revolve around the earth? Of course not–though they probably did feel deflated. But that was just because they were cosmologically narcissistic. You don’t have to be that dumb or that narcissistic.

Nobody can reject you without your complicity in defining ‘rejection.’ Any time you hear ‘handling rejection,’ learn to laugh at yourself for thinking it’s about you–and go back to being curious.