Chapter 1

Get Your Map and Your Compass

The lies sellers are told, how your journey shapes your selling, and why sales philosophy, methodology, and process are not the same thing.

A brass compass
Your compass for the journey ahead.

I’m sorry to report that you’ve been lied to all through your sales career. There is no such thing as a Buyer’s Journey.

Even I perpetuated this lie as a sales leader for a long time too. But the Buyer’s Journey just doesn’t exist. There’s only a Seller’s Journey. Everything else is about the Buyer’s Experience.

Now, before you start yelling at me through this book or audiobook, or throwing your Kindle or iPad, hear me out for just a few minutes. (And remember, you have my email; send me your Venmo.)

Think about when you go to a restaurant. No one ever asks you, “How was your journey to the restaurant?” Nobody asks about your Uber ride or your drive there. They ask you how your experience was when you got there. How was the food? Was the service good? What was the ambience like? They want to know about the experience of being at that restaurant.

When we need to find an electrician, want to buy a new TV or car, or whatever it may be, we often seek advice from friends. We want to find a trusted source. If you’ve ever had a friend tell you not to hire a certain person or service, was it because they had a bad Buyer’s Journey? No. It’s because they had a bad Buyer’s Experience.

Think about shopping online. We want to know what other people’s experience was like, so we typically look for overall star ratings to give us a simple starting point, then we sort through the results. In my case, I love to sort the ratings from worst to best. Why? Because I want to know the worst thing that can happen. We love hearing about someone else’s miserable experience so we can avoid it ourselves. Plus, it helps us remember times we’ve made a bad purchasing decision and feel better because we know we’re not alone. In some cases, we’ll ignore negative reviews because the overwhelmingly positive reviews outweigh them, and in others we’ll use the negative reviews to help us choose or push us into something else.

If you’re a sales leader, you know how important reviews are for your business. How often do you ask for a referral from your customers? Do you go to review sites like G2? This is where your Buyer’s Expe- rience shows through.

One person asked me a while ago, “What about at the very beginning, when someone decides they want to consider a purchase. Isn’t that part of a Buyer’s Journey?” I simply responded, “Not really, because there was some experience prior to that decision that made them curious.”

So repeat after me: there is no such thing as the Buyer’s Journey; it’s all about the Buyer’s Experience. All that really matters is how the Seller’s Journey guides the Buyer’s Experience. And we want to ensure the Seller’s Journey is as impactful and positive as possible for everyone involved.

How Has Your Journey Been So Far?

I know: the Seller’s Journey is not always as impactful and positive as possible.

Sales can be cutthroat. It can be demoralizing. And it can fuck with your mind, which then fucks with your life. And every time you get a new sales leader, they just make it worse because they think their way is the only way. And all of this can fuck with the Buyer’s Experience.

Sales is fraught with differing methodologies, ideologies, opinions, mindsets, and practices. It can be really confusing. And the one thing that’s missing regularly is the most important part: humanity.

So let’s define humanity in sales. From our vantage point this means treating people like people first, not a number. That does not mean the number doesn’t matter; it does mean the number is not the only thing that matters.

Let’s take it a step further. Humanity means being humane. And simply put, if you would not talk to a child in the aggressive manner you think you can talk to a salesperson in, well, then in fact you are not being humane.

Humanity means you can be vulnerable, welcoming, warm, sincere, direct, honest—and still have high expectations. If you are not willing to address the specifics to high expectations, then you are not being humane.

Hitting your goals and metrics—whether you’re an individual contributor, a manager, or a leader—is crucial, and it’s significant for how you build your or your team’s skills and confidence so that you can maintain results. A lot more goes into creating or choosing the right methodology and sales process than many people think. If you simply choose one because that’s the one that everyone else is using, then you might be doing it wrong. While your company may claim to be the “world leader in ,” I can assure you that you are not, period. And if you are simply doing a copycat of what someone else is doing, you definitely are not a leader. You are merely a follower.

All of this imperfection is what really explains why sales is the greatest profession in the world. Once you realize and accept that it’s never going to be perfect but can always be perfected, and once you accept there is always something to learn, and you are willing to commit, that is when you know you will be successful. The road to success is paved over the potholes of risk-taking, mistakes, mini-wins, and an open mind.

For the Sales Leaders

It can be hard to implement changes to the team and get their buy-in when they’re not feeling confident in their sales skills.

And this is the purpose of this book. To help you and others around you build courage and confidence for yourself or your teams while gaining actionable skills, so when you and your team are in the trenches, it becomes easier to see a successful way out.

My approach to business and sales has always been aligned with servant leadership and processes. At my company, The Harris Consulting Group, making it about the prospect and customer has been in our foundation since day one. Making sure we can have human-to-human conversations has always been critical to our core beliefs as well as our sales training. We teach reps how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask, and when. The COVID pandemic just confirmed what we already knew and have been teaching for years: when the pandemic hit, it felt like many people finally understood what it meant to be more empathetic to another human being. (Separate of the politics, of course).

Everyone knew someone who had COVID. This led many organizations to both subconsciously and consciously realize that how you talk to someone who is dealing with big changes matters. It’s personal, it’s emotional, and sometimes it’s not easy.

During the pandemic, more organizations started seeking sales training because they finally realized that when you take a moment to genuinely speak with someone, the entire conversation becomes more personal, meaningful, healthy, and engaging.

However, over the same few years, everyone’s been using the buzzword “growth mindset.” And for the record, I hate buzzwords. The reason I hate them is that while they capture one’s attention, the definition of that buzzword can be different for the person saying it than it is for the person hearing it.

And with this in mind, here’s how I see the phrase “growth mindset.” In the context of this book, we define growth mindset as a sharing mindset: when we share, we also open our minds up to learning, and that is where the growth can come from. We share our knowledge and wisdom.

It didn’t happen when I was going through sales— it just didn’t exist. The successful salespeople didn’t know how to explain what made them successful, and even if they did know, they would never share the secrets. And many times when they knew, they would simply say, “Uhhh, well, I don’t know.” Even though they did. But now the mindset has completely shifted. Now we give away our knowledge and wisdom. Why? Because it’s the human and humane thing to do. I want to help people to be better, so why not? The more I help others, the more they will want to help me. And even when they don’t help me, they actually do. They help me by staying out of my way so that those who do want to reciprocate have an easy path. It’s the long tail. This is humanity, not selfishness, and not manipulation. This is the sharing mindset.

My hope is that anyone who’s really curious and interested in maintaining a sales growth mindset will be in a sharing mindset to help others and encourage others to share and learn. Pay. It. Forward.

We’re All in This Together

I don’t expect everything in this book to be perfect and work every single time, and I hope that by sharing these things we all get better. We try, we adapt, we evolve—and we approach a growth mindset. As we share together, we grow together, and the more I invested in my life or career in sales, the more I realized how badly we all need that to thrive not by ourselves, but together. #Humanity

Twenty-ish years ago, I started on the trek of really, truly learning and understanding myself. My history, my upbringing, the way that I tick. . . everything. And my personal journey really turned into my professional journey.

I’m sharing all of this because I didn’t always have an open mind. I was old-school. I didn’t share, and I definitely did not see the value in sharing. In short, I was an asshole. Over time and through a lot of reconnecting with myself, I learned how great the opportunity is and how much value there is in continuing to learn. On the personal side, it’s wanting people to know they’re not alone, and that also works for the professional side too.

I call this being a per-fessional—a combination of personal and professional—because, at the end of the day, we’re one whole being. Our personal selves blend with our professional selves, so it’s not about each of those personalities being at odds with one another. It’s about turning to thinking, How can we make the two more harmonious?

Right now we need more humanity in sales than ever before. We are constantly bombarded with so much negativity in life. So many people like being experts and so many people are embracing anger as if tone of voice increases the rationality of their position. This is disappointing. We can disagree without being disagreeable.

We must take the steps to bring humanity back into the sales world, embrace it, and never let it go.

Better? Faster? Cheaper? More Human

Companies are always wanting to do things better, faster, and cheaper. Unfortunately, they can only do two at a time very well. If they claim they can do cheaper and faster, it won’t be better; cheaper and better won’t be faster; and better and faster won’t be cheaper. But where is humanity in all of this?

Once a company understands that cheaper isn’t always cheaper—that sometimes spending money now means you aren’t paying more later in either dollars or human capital—then they begin to understand humanity.

Once a company understands that faster isn’t always faster—that sometimes you may delay a part of the strategy so you can develop it more, and that’s actually cheaper and faster in the long run—then they begin to understand humanity.

But it’s a tough needle to thread. Finding the right balance between doing it right and doing it right now is not easy. Especially when we don’t have a compass to guide us on our path.

For the last decade or so, sales has been focused on improving effectiveness and efficiency with the better tools at our disposal—what’s often called the sales stack. Many of these tools are table stakes and should be required when taking a job. But they have made us better in some ways and worse in others. They have definitely improved efficiency, but they have not helped with effectiveness. In fact, one could argue they have done us a disservice and practically eliminated the humanity.

People will do business with us not just because of what we do; they will do business with us because of how we do it: the human-to-human relationship. As important as the human-to-human interaction is during the sales conversation, equally important is how they feel about us as people after the meeting.

Whether you’ve been in sales for twenty years or two, you know the profession is always evolving. As I write this book, in the spring of 2023, generative AI is just starting to get real attention in the sales community, not just prospecting. And I see people making the same mistake with AI that they made with other sales enablement platforms: they are thinking it can help them go better, faster, and cheaper, and they are forgetting all about the humanity.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve been able to witness sales from both the selling and buying side for companies. I’ve been able to dive deep into different structures of sales organizations and pull apart what works and what doesn’t, maintain integrity, and allow each salesperson to be their authentic self—their own self-realized human. And I’ve developed the compass and map that will help guide you on the most impactful and positive Seller’s Journey possible: N.E.A.T. Selling.

This Is N.E.A.T. Selling™

When we speak about the humanity in sales, it’s important to understand all buying decisions are deeply personal and emotional. That is where they start, and that is where they end, period. As my friend James Harbeck once told me, humans are big bags of feelings with a brain that creates narratives and justifications for following the feelings, and experiences are things you feel something about—that’s why you’re motivated by them and remember them. When we recognize this, we recognize the humanity.

We (sales and marketing professionals) build the journey so that our prospects and customers have an amazing experience. That’s what matters most. The Seller’s Journey must enhance the Buyer’s Experience. This is what we mean by humanity in sales.

So we like to put the two together using three perspectives:

  1. Situation: We assess the situation using N.E.A.T. Selling. This is our compass.
  2. Relationship: We understand the relationship with our prospects and customers by understanding the ego and using Respect Contracts. These contracts are followed by our company, our crew, and the people we are going on the journey with.
  3. Methodology: We enhance communication through a method of specific tactics and soft skills. This is our map and our guidebook—and our equipment and techniques.

This book goes through all of these. If you do the hard work on them, you’ll connect better, make more good sales, and everyone will be happier. You and your sales process will be more human.

Before I introduce you to N.E.A.T. Selling and tell you the details of it, however—before I even tell you what N.E.A.T. stands for—I want to address a fundamental question about what kind of thing it is I’m showing you: is it a philosophy, a methodology, or a process? The answer to this question is: yes.

Sales Philosophy

A sales philosophy is your commitment to your growth mindset as a sales professional. It is built on top of your values and culture. And it is used to guide how you treat people, which means your sales teams, your prospects, and your customers. It is your pathway to revenue.

A sales philosophy includes principles like these:

If you see N.E.A.T. Selling itself as your philosophy, we define that as “Teaching your reps how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask, and when to do it.” Or just call it #EarningTheRight.

As a philosophy, this can always be bolted onto your current sales methodology or process.

Sales Methodology

A sales methodology is a specific set of guidelines and strategies used to carry out the sales philosophy and talk with the prospect. It helps give balance to the process and reduce noise in a meaningful way that aids the opportunity in proceeding to close. The methodology is about how you will take someone through the Seller’s Journey.

Examples of sales methodologies include:

Sales Process

Essentially, the sales process is what you will do to give people the experience you want them to have as they go through their decision-making process.

A sales process must include the different emotional experiences—the most important of which is typically trust—that you want them to feel as they evaluate you and your services. Therefore, as you build your sales process, it’s important to make sure you have the exit criteria in each stage.

By exit criteria, I mean a specific piece of information gathered or an activity that indicates a step forward in the process. Examples include demo scheduled or demo completed, pricing discussed, pricing confirmed, customer confirms you are short-listed as a potential vendor.

When defining your sales process, it’s important to remember that the stages of your process are not actual activities. “Demo” is not a stage in the sales process. Neither are “Proposal,” “Economic Buyer Identified,” “Champion Identified,” or “Redlining.” These are all activities that occur within the sales process; in some cases, they are the actual exit criteria.

Your Choice

So, for your own needs and your company’s, you may choose to see N.E.A.T. Selling as more of a philosophy, a process, or a methodology.

As an example, if I’m working with a larger enterprise company like Visa, they might view N.E.A.T. Selling as more of a philosophy attached to their existing process, and less of a full overhaul of their current one. As a larger organization, they might already have strict sales processes full of required fields they need to update in their customer relationship management (CRM) software, specific ways they need to do those updates to make them count, and they may even have very clear scripting that they don’t want people to iterate on. N.E.A.T. Selling bolts on to help remind the team to drive Economic Impact within their existing sales process.

Meanwhile, other clients might love N.E.A.T. Selling because it breaks the complex into small, meaningful, easy-to-understand steps. Even for larger enterprise and complex sales cycles with ten or more decision-makers from various departments, it helps them align strategic outcomes with a powerful customer experience. And they can still use what’s in their CRM if they so desire. At the core, N.E.A.T. Selling helps each of them in their own way to bring a little humanity to sales.

No matter how you decide to view or execute N.E.A.T. Selling principles, all the concepts taught here will work for any person in sales, any sales process, and any sales methodology. And as a bonus, these are life skills too. Which is a huge part of how and why I started N.E.A.T. Selling in the first place.

DoRip and Replace!

What’s at the core is a guiding principle. I created N.E.A.T. Selling to bridge the strategic and tactical silos to improve the Buyer’s Experience and seller’s mindset. The desired end result is to utilize N.E.A.T. Selling to improve trust, forecasting accuracy, close ratios, and revenue growth.

The advantage to adopting N.E.A.T. Selling is that it’s not a rip-and-replace solution for your current process.

What we’ve found working with dozens of teams over the years is that when there is a problem with an existing sales process, it typically means that they haven’t been coaching what’s already created. All too often a new sales leader comes in and decides to rip and replace the current process. Wrong! Bad idea! Hard stop!

Organizations spend months rolling out newly vetted processes meant to help guide teams to close more revenue, and there will always be a multitude of different ways to achieve the same outcome. They call a meeting; maybe it’s an hour, or god forbid maybe it’s part of the sales kickoff (SKO). And they simply get it wrong, thinking this is all it takes to make the change (#SteakKnives!).

So why do so many sales leaders rip and replace? One simple answer: their ego. They have promised to part the Red Sea and deliver everyone to the Kingdom of the IPO. And last we heard, the average tenure for a VP of Sales is somewhere around sixteen months.

Now don’t get me wrong, a sales process is a must. And yes, it can always be tweaked and improved. But changing it every year? Where is the humanity in that? In fact, it’s inhumane because the change is merely about some leader’s desire to feel better about themselves because they know they only have sixteen months to prove themselves before the next one comes along (#SteakKnives!).

So, which of these is more humane? Imagine you’re at your SKO. Would you prefer learning a whole new process and all the new fields because your dashboard won’t really change that much but the executives will, or would you prefer spending an hour learning how to negotiate with someone in a procurement department?

Can you imagine walking into a company like Visa and telling them to change everything in the CRM? Can you imagine the Economic Impact that would create with all the changes to reporting and dashboards? Or how it affects all the different departments, then how long it will take to implement? Then how long it will take to onboard everyone into the “new way”? It’s exhausting just thinking about it. Maybe it’s necessary at times. But we think it’s mostly a way for consultants to sell a huge services contract.

How Not to Fail

Let me repeat this: when I see any sales process fail, it’s most likely because there isn’t significant training, coaching, and reinforcement of the sales skills needed to achieve the desired outcomes.

If it’s not being reinforced and coached by leadership on a regular basis, it’s going to fail. From the least experienced reps who love coaching to the veteran salty dogs and Grumpy Guses, if you do not coach and reinforce, it will fail.

We’ve entered this new phase as companies and sales organizations in the last decade where our options and choices are multiplying constantly. Whether it be for trainers, coaches, methodologies, tools, products . . . whatever it is, we have endless options.

Sellers and leaders are iterating on sales processes regularly, or they should be at least. But if the consistency and reinforcement isn’t there, it’s not going to stick. If you’re a sales leader, the power of continual emphasis on your sales process is going to boost your team’s results so long as your approach is aligned with the sales process that’s needed or in place at that moment.

It’s OK to leave what you have and let N.E.A.T. Selling take over from there. You can have your teams follow another process while N.E.A.T. Selling supplements everything you are doing in your CRM. And by not making changes to the CRM, you are not wasting time (and Economic Impact) on reconfiguring all the reports and dashboards.

Remember: N.E.A.T. Selling can be a philosophy, a methodology, or a process, as you see fit. It’s an add-on to bring an additional layer of flavor and value to what you’re trying to accomplish.