Daniel Pink, in his book, To Sell is Human, talks about how sales has shifted due to ease of access to information. In the past, salespeople had leverage because they had information their customers couldn’t otherwise access. When someone purchased, they would get the goods and services and the knowhow that was otherwise impossible to come by.
Now, with the proliferation of information, the model is changing. I think it is worth taking a moment to walk through the hierarchy of understanding. You can find a million different infographics on the web about it. Usually, they are in the shape of a pyramid with data on the bottom, then information, knowledge, and wisdom at the top.
Let’s take a look at the data
To take a segue, the amount of data we are producing is staggering. Right now, on my body, I have three devices that are producing data for me. I have a ring that tracks my sleep quality, my pulse, my heart rate variability, respiration rate, body temperature, etc. I have a watch that tracks similar details plus pace frequency, pace length, etc. My phone not only tracks my location, but it also tells me the last time I visited a friend’s house, when I last frequented a specific store, what walking/driving paths I took on a specific date, and how far I walked on a certain day vs. drove. It can also tell me how much time I’ve spent reading and how long I’ve spent browsing the web. It is a ridiculous amount of data. I once tried to download it all as raw data to play with on my own. It was both overwhelming and unintelligible.
Information is more interesting
Data is kind of useless by itself. It needs to become information to become actionable. Taking my example, my ring will give me a sleep score and a readiness score for the day based on how well my body is doing. It does this by aggregating my overnight pulse, heart rate variability, respiration rate, etc. Likewise, my phone will show me a graph of time spent reading vs. time spent web browsing. These are both valuable and actionable to me as someone else has put the time in to analyze the data and present it to me in meaningful ways.
Knowledge trumps all
I feel like as an adult, I’ve always had access to data points and information about them. For example, I’ve had data points for years showing that my washing machine was not in a healthy state: weird noises, strange and undecipherable error codes, not always turning on. However, it wasn’t until the access to the wealth of knowledge on the internet that I was able to understand what to do about it. I found a video on YouTube that very explicitly showed me what part to get. It showed me, step by step, how to replace it. It even warned me about the most likely place I’d cut myself on the sharp metal (accurate). There is no way I would have even considered doing this before the proliferation of knowledge available to me.
Except for wisdom
Oh short lived pride! After my in-home repairs, the washing machine lasted only a few months more before giving up the ghost. I should have had the wisdom to know that it was time to replace it. Certainly an expert would have known. Likewise, in the case of all these data points on my body, I already have the wisdom to know that I need 8 hours of sleep and that having that extra glass of wine is going to mean that I won’t sleep as well.
So how does all of this apply to sales?
Companies used to be able to get away with selling knowledge. Now, knowledge is becoming commoditized. I don’t need the repair person in my home because I have access to three different ones on YouTube showing me what to do. We have access to such an amazing wealth of information and knowledge on the internet, it is overwhelming. And that’s where Pink comes in. He points out that our job is to be the curators of all of this data, information, and knowledge for our customers. They are hiring us for our wisdom!
To use 4DX language, those in our marketplace are frequently caught up in the whirlwind of their daily activities. They don’t have the time to stay on top of the trends of each problem space in their lives. We have the luxury for focusing on a specific problem space for our customers. This is our business! It is our job to curate information and use our wisdom to choose which information a given customer needs to hear. Additionally, we have the opportunity to share curated knowledge more broadly to our entire community.
Sales becomes working directly with our customers to understand them in a deeper and more profound level. In means both learning from them and sharing from your combined set of learnings when the time is right. It is also stepping back and paying attention to the marketplace. We have the opportunity and space to learn from and organize the combined knowledge of our community. This will lead to the wisdom that our customers are seeking.
A note to future me:
Stay a student of the system – listen to your customers, learn from them and from the experts.
Thanks to Jeremy Bezanger for his shot of the Great Pyramid of Giza.