- December 15, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We will attend Boston Ballet’s Performance of The Nutcracker again this year.
We have been attending this performance as a family for nearly 24 years, a tradition my wife began to make sure we treasure each holiday season!
I first wrote about The Nutcracker as an analogy to selling back in 2010 and have reposted it with my annual updates for the past fifteen years. A reread is well worth it. I’ll begin with my annual update.
Annual Update
AI was not integrated into the 2025 performance of the Nutcracker, despite it making tremendous inroads into sales. While sales is benefitting from AI, it won’t become a part of actual selling. Customers do not want a bot selling to them and find it hard enough to tolerate when bad salespeople sell to them.
Why?
You’ve experienced automated phone systems, the inability to reach a human (because they don’t want you to), and website chatbots that are supposed to help but don’t. We all hate that and yes, it will get a lot better. But it’s one thing to get quick answers to common issues. It’s quite another for a bot to understand your emotional needs that may be driving a purchase. It’s even more difficult in complex B2B sales to develop relationships, partnerships, and be a trusted resource. I use Grok (xAI) and still can’t get it to provide me with accurate information. It’s a great research assistant, editor, idea creator, and automator of tedious grunt work. But I don’t want it talking with my clients – yet. I have been building an AI-Dave that will coach and role-play with salespeople as me, and as good as me, but while the potential is amazing, I am still teaching it how to role play like me. It makes mistakes, gets confused, forgets, and is sometimes flat out wrong.
For example, the following mistakes happen rarely, but they still happen:
AI-Dave begins asking if the salesperson wants coaching on a real world scenario, a debrief of a recent call, or to role play a hypothetical scenario. The salesperson says, “role play a hypothetical scenario.” AI-Dave asks a few questions about the prospect’s title, the goal of the call, what the salesperson might want to work on, and starts the role play. AI-Dave is supposed to play the salesperson to demonstrate what “good” sounds like but randomly puts the salesperson in that role. Using Baseline Selling as a reference, AI-Dave asks which base the salesperson is trying to reach, the salesperson says, “2nd base,” and AI Dave asks for the value of the opportunity which we wouldn’t know until 3rd base.
AI-Dave won’t go into beta until it’s near perfect. Speaking of which, this annual Nutcracker performance is perfect. Every year. Never fails. I wish salespeople could perform like that.
With that said, enjoy the annual repost of my Nutcracker article which is as true today as it was in 2010.
The Nutcracker Article
If you attend a performance of The Nutcracker or simply listen to some of the suite during the holiday season, one of the selections you’ll hear is “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” Perhaps you can’t match the music to the title, but I’m sure if you listen to the first 30 seconds of this version, you’ll recognize the melody.
Even though you’ve surely heard it before, can you identify the four primary musical instruments at the beginning of the selection?
In this version, you’re hearing the Glass Armonica (invented by Benjamin Franklin!), while most orchestral versions and performances today feature the celesta, oboe, bassoon and flutes. Can you hear them?
Just as the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” sounds familiar to you, your salespeople find familiarity in the sounds, questions, comments and discussions on their sales calls. As much as you may not be able to distinguish the specific instruments creating those sounds in “Dance…”, your salespeople may not be able to distinguish the credible comments and questions from what we can safely call noise, empty promises, or fake news.
Near the end of a sales call, suppose your salespeople hear one prospect say, “This has been a very interesting and productive conversation and we might have some interest in this.” And imagine another prospect at the same meeting says, “We’ll get back to you next month and let you know what kind of progress we’ve made.” And still a third might say, “In the meantime, please send us a proposal with references and timeline.”
There are some great lessons from those three possibilities:
Lesson #1 (based on Objective Management Group’s data)
- 70% of salespeople begin working on the proposal and tell their bosses that their large opportunity is very promising because all 3 prospects in the meeting were very interested;
- 19% leave the call and make 2 entries in their CRM – “propose” and “follow-up” – and they’ll eventually do both;
- 11% continue meeting with their prospects, asking more questions and gaining clarification.
Lesson #2:
- Prospects’ voices are like musical instruments. Each instrument in “Dance…” has a specific role in the performance. If the wrong instrument or notes are played or they’re played at the wrong time, the entire selection is ruined. Prospects’ comments in the scenario above have different meanings depending on their business titles and roles in the buying process.
- If “please send us a proposal”, “we’re interested” or “very productive” are spoken from an Executive – the CEO, President or VP of something – it has a far different meaning than if the comment were to come from a buyer in Procurement.
- When any of those 3 comments are spoken by a user – an engineer for example – rather than a buyer or an Executive, the comments may be far more genuine, but carry little authority.
Lesson #3:
- Sometimes it’s more fun to listen to a song, symphony or simple melody to determine how and why the composer or arranger selected the particular instruments to play the particular parts of the selection.
- Your salespeople must apply that wonder and analysis to their sales calls. The prospect may be the composer (started the initiative), arranger (selected the vendors to talk with), director (charged with the initiative and conducting the process) or musician (users following directions of the conductor). It’s the salesperson’s job to figure out who they’re dealing with, what role they play, what influence they’ll have and how to get the various players aligned on the compelling reasons to buy and your ideal solution.
Which of the 3 sales outcomes from lesson #1 do you/your salespeople typically find themselves doing?
Which additional questions do those salespeople stay to ask?
I hope you enjoyed my annual Nutcracker article.
Grok suggested that I link to my 2022 analogy of the holiday movie Spirited because together, “Both pieces scream ‘Listen deeper, sell smarter’ amid the tinsel. If you’re brewing a holiday sales analogy series, this duo’s already a banger; throw in Die Hard next year for the ‘Yippee-ki-yay, negotiation’ remix!”
That’s Grok for you.
Sales lessons abound. I see them everywhere and all the time. I wish I could write about all of them but there simply isn’t time.
Whatever you celebrate, enjoy your holiday and have a Happy New Year!
