The more time we spend helping other people succeed, the more successful we’re likely to be.
Consider the following sales scenario: You’re deeply conflicted because you know the solution you’re offering to a customer is not ideal for them. But you’ve been working on this deal for months, or even longer. It would represent a significant portion of your company’s business and, therefore, a substantial portion of your earnings. And your own work life is pretty hectic at the moment.
Maybe it’s the end of the quarter, you need to get closer to hitting your bonus, or perhaps even the President’s Club. Maybe your personal expenses have been rising while your comp is flat. Perhaps it’s worse—maybe your boss has told you that if your down year continues you may be on the wrong end of a sales team reorg.
If you ask a salesperson to assess their own intent in such a scenario, you’re likely to hear a positive answer. Their job, they’ll say, is to serve the customer, or something similar. To put others’ needs before their own so that both can thrive.
Listen to a salesperson work, however, and you might come away thinking there’s a gap between stated principles and actual behavior. This is not a way of saying that many salespeople are unprincipled professionals. They are not. But they might be a lot more self-serving than they’d like others, and themselves, to believe.
Acclaimed theoretical physicist Richard Feynman has a wonderful quote: “The first principle is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
This self-deception is something I see often with sales colleagues. They may know that their intent counts far more than anything else they bring to work each day. Yet they’re human. They are susceptible to the same pressures as the rest of us, and can easily allow those pressures to overwhelm their best intentions of serving their customers in favor of serving their own needs.
It’s an interesting paradox. While giving in to our own desires may help us in the short term, it’s truly deadly for long-term success. Because ultimately the more time we spend helping other people succeed, the more successful we’re likely to be.
That sales scenario I mentioned at the top isn’t just theoretical—I lived it. And while there are times in my career when I’ve failed important tests, in this case I didn’t.
The deal I was working on had taken 18 months to put together. It represented a big portion of our company’s total business. Then, near the finish line, the customer asked for a significant change I knew wouldn’t serve them well. I had seen this happen before. And I knew the likely outcome: A slow unwinding of the relationship as both sides tried to forget the bad deal they had agreed to.
I was determined to not let that happen. Even though I wanted that deal very much, at that moment I allowed my intent to win out. I made it clear how I felt and also made it clear we were willing to walk away, rather than give them something I was not confident would help them succeed.
We still won the contract. And I believe that one of the main reasons we won a very competitive opportunity is that our willingness to lose revealed our true intent. As with so many other contract negotiations before, that focus on a customer’s needs above my own produced dividends for years to come.
Tell someone what you know they don’t want to hear in order to help them, and you’ll often gain a customer for life. Not only that, but you’ll also gain a prolific referrer as well. It’s how personal brands are built. And the greater the opportunity you turn down, the greater the possibility you’ve earned someone’s trust forever.
Of course, it’s all easy when our intent aligns with what a customer wants to hear. But the odds of delusion, both for yourself and for your customer, get a lot higher once those two things no longer align. Hard as it may be to keep in mind, your intent matters all the time, and all the more when things are hard.