- December 10, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
It sounds like a stretch but as a former musician, it’s clear, at least to me, that music and selling are nearly the same thing.
If we focus on popular music of the past 75 years, the structure of every song consists of a melody, to which lyrics can be attached, and chord changes.
Melodies use the twelve notes of the musical scale, and most cover no more than the two middle octaves. The melodies occur in the context of time signatures that determine the number of beats to a bar.
Chords, made up of either three or four notes, accompany those melodies and include one or more notes from that part of the melody. Rock and Roll and Blues typically use a three-chord structure.
If you want to add oomph to an existing song, and apply more of a swinging style, it becomes Jazz. If you want to play a spontaneous solo, that would be improvisation. Good improv follows the existing chord structure of the song. Bad improv, and you would know it when you hear it, is winging it.
To follow the principles of music, one must follow the process of composing a melody with appropriate chord changes using a methodology which, if you mess with it, you will end up with an awful mutation. The most recent mutation is called rap music.
To follow the principles of selling, one must follow a basic sales process which, instead of bars and time signatures, uses stages and milestones, and instead of a lyrics, uses dialog. If you want to add your own style, or turn it into jazz, inject your personality. While winging a solo can turn a good song bad, when you wing it in sales, you risk turning a predictive sales process into an unpredictable outcome.
The concept of team selling applies here too.
In music, there are singer/songwriters, or soloists, who play a guitar or piano while singing their songs. Then there are small bands, combos, and chamber groups where the instrumentalists add vibrancy, texture, and harmony to the music, and often take solos. Full orchestras and big bands can accompany a singer or soloist, or the entire band or orchestra may be featured in concert.
Most salespeople are the equivalent of soloists who conduct the entire sales cycle alone. When calling on larger accounts, especially in a technical or complex sale, others will join the sales process at certain predetermined times, taking on the appearance of a combo. When selling to enterprise accounts, participation from the sales organization and leadership, can appear to be the equivalent of a full orchestra.
The best songwriters of our time, legends like Elton John, Paul McCartney, and Billy Joel, stick to the process and methodology for creating hit songs.
Similarly, the best salespeople stick to their sales process and methodology.
Objective Management Group’s data on 2.4 million salespeople shows that only 15% of the bottom half of all salespeople follow and execute an effective sales process while more than 83% of the top salespeople follow and execute an effective sales process.
“The best salespeople are 553% better at sticking to the principles of selling.”
The comparisons between the principles of music and selling are solid. The science from OMG backs it up.
Anecdotally, there are a fairly large percentage of sales experts who were or continue to be musicians. I see their guitars hanging on the wall when I appear on their podcasts, or when we visit over Zoom. It’s easier for a musician to quickly realize how sales process and methodology correlate to music. We take to it like a duck takes to water and how white sticks to rice.
You don’t have to be a musician to embrace the principles of selling. If you know how crucial the principles of selling are to sales success and you are committed to sales success, you’ll embrace sales process and methodology.
