Differentiates you from the competition in a way that product features cannot
Improves emotional engagement
Gives you a North Star during times of stress and change
When your entire organization is focused on making a difference to customers, people engage more deeply, they care more, and customers respond, and you win the market.
Do one thing: Look at the ecosystem surrounding your sellers, and ask yourself: are they pointed toward customers, or toward internal targets? Identify one area you can infuse the customer's voice into the conversation.
CHAPTER 2 How a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) Changes Your Brain
Great minds have purpose, others have wishes.
—Washington Irving, short‐story writer
Imagine you're at a neighborhood party or standing on the sidelines of a kid's soccer game. You engage in a conversation with the person next to you, and he asks the age‐old question: “What do you do for a living?”
How do you answer? You've likely been asked the question a hundred times, so you probably have a standard job description‐type answer. If you're alone right now, say it out loud. If you're reading this book on a plane or in a coffee shop, just mumble your answer under your breath.
Pay attention to how you feel saying those words.
If you're like most people, you probably give a fairly rote response that doesn't require much thinking: something along the lines of, “I sell software” or “I'm regional manager for XYZ Company.” If you work for an impressive firm or you have an impressive title, you may have said, “I run a sales team for Google” or “I'm the VP of Sales at Clorox.” But it's usually still a pretty standard answer.
Again, remember how it feels to say those words out loud. This is your baseline.
Now, to give you an understanding of what Noble Purpose does to your mind, we're going to go a bit deeper.
I'd like you to think about a time when you made a difference to another person at work. Perhaps you helped someone on your team, did something great for a customer, or lent an ear when a colleague needed to talk. It may have happened in your current job, or it may have been in a past job. Either one is fine.
What was the situation?
How did you make a difference?
What did the other person say?
How did he or she look?
How did you feel afterward?
Imagine yourself telling this story out loud. In fact, if you have a colleague or friend nearby, tell them your story.
Compare how you felt in the first scenario, when you described what you did for a living, with how you felt in the second scenario, where you told a story about making a difference.
What do you notice?
How was the second time different from the first time? Which one did you enjoy talking about more? Which one was more engaging? Which one makes you prouder? And here's the key question: which story would you rather listen to if you were on the other end?
Most people experience a pretty dramatic shift when they move from function‐based conversation to a more purposeful “make a difference” conversation.
When I pose these questions in keynotes, I ask people: “Tell the person next to you what you do for a living.” The room is a low‐level buzz. Then, when you ask people to describe a time you made a difference to another person at work, the whole room lights up. The physical and emotional difference between the two scenarios is startling. When I ask groups to compare them, I hear things like:
“The first time was a no‐brainer, but the second time I was totally into it.”
“The first time was boring; the second time was more emotional.”
“I was on autopilot the first time, but the second time it was like I was reliving the experience again.”
“The first time I thought it; the second time I felt it.”
That's a fairly accurate description of what happens to your brain. The first time—when you describe your job—you're using your brain at a very basic level, almost on autopilot. The second time, when you describe making a difference, you ignite your frontal lobe. This is the part of the brain associated with reasoning, planning, problem‐solving, language, and higher‐level emotions such as empathy and altruism.
Describing the meaningful impact you had on another person engages a higher‐level part of your brain than when you describe your job function. Here's what I observe when people do this exercise: When people talk about what their basic job function, they:
Smile politely
Use rote language, such as reseller, provider, end‐to‐end solutions, implement, and so on
Sit relatively still
And their listeners nod nicely.
When people describe making a difference, they:
Smile with their whole faces
Use colorful details, such as describing the look on someone's face or the setting
Become much more animated and describe the impact they had on someone
And their listeners lean in and ask questions.
People share the two experiences—what they do for a living versus making a difference—within five minutes of each other. When you stand on the stage, watching people respond, you'd think it was a completely different day. They look like an entirely different group of people.
The first time, it's just a regular crowd of businesspeople politely speaking to one another in low voices. The second time, volume cranks up. The people get engaged. They start laughing. Some people even stand up when they tell the second story. They can't help themselves.
There's more energy and enthusiasm in the air. When you watch them the second time, you'd think they'd just won the lottery or heard some great news. And in a way, they did. By describing how they made a difference to someone, they got the best payoff a human being can have: they were reminded of just how much their life matters.
These are the kind of powerful emotions that selling with Noble Purpose can ignite.
Customer Centricity Is Not Enough
A lot of organizations prioritize customer centricity. It sounds good in theory. Let's rally our organization around customer needs. Go team! But customer centricity as it's typically implemented is missing a crucial element: impact.
Meeting the customer's needs is certainly better than ignoring your customer's needs. But it can put your team in a reactive position, one that is no different from any of your competitors. If customers are telling you their needs, they're also telling your competition. Most customer‐centric strategies as they're practiced today rely on the unspoken assumption that the customer has the best and most accurate understanding of their needs. In many cases, this isn't true. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
It's not that sellers should be arrogant and ignore