The U-Haul Discovery That Will Save Selling

I was doing my best Doobie Brothers imitation and Rockin’ Down the Highway to a storage unit, driving a U-Haul rental truck. I noticed how much the inside of the truck resembled the car I drove when I got my driver’s license in the early 70s. The area in front of the driver was 100% analog. Actual dials on the dashboard instead of digital versions. Knobs instead of touchscreens. AM/FM radio with push-button selectors. No CarPlay, no Bluetooth, no navigation, no display screen, and no “auto” settings. Everything was mechanical—crank windows, push/pull door locks, a key in the ignition, and a steering-column gear shift. Nostalgic? Yes. User-friendly? Not really.

With that caveman setup I realized I wasn’t distracted by CarPlay, its apps, or Waze. It was so loud inside the cabin that I couldn’t even hear a radio station. I was completely focused on the road. It made me a better driver.

It also got me thinking about what selling was like in the 70s, when the sales version of the caveman setup was a desk phone, a Rolodex, a supply of 3×5 cards in a file box, file folders, and a roll of dimes for pay phones. That was it.

We didn’t have email, text, video conferencing, CRM, sequencers, workflows, sales intelligence, LinkedIn, or AI. We hadn’t even dreamed of that stuff yet. And because our attention wasn’t being pulled toward any of it, we had the whole day to focus on selling. We used the phone to schedule meetings and make follow-up calls, but the bulk of every salesperson’s day was face-to-face selling.

What could you accomplish if you had nothing else to do except sell?

I’m not anti-technology. As a matter of fact, despite being on the 18th hole of my sales consulting career, I have always been an early adopter. I was the first kid on my block with a go-kart, a car, a job, a business, a reputation, a fax machine, a computer, a homemade proprietary software program to run the business, a sales-specific assessment, an email address, a blog, a complete integrated sales process, CRM, and AI. Except for the go-kart and the fax machine, everything else has remained. The one thing I wasn’t an early adopter of was online, self-directed training and when I did join that party, it was because the platform would support my vision for it.

So I’m not against the tools. I’m against the distraction. The technology can help, but it does not generate revenue. The selling does. And I wonder how much better most salespeople would be if they spent their time focused on selling instead of managing the technology that is supposed to support the selling. Read Why Salespeople Adopted the Deck and Abandoned the Phone.

Some companies are still behind and missing tools they actually need. Others have stacked so much technology on top of their salespeople that I wonder what it will take for the whole thing to topple. Either way, the tools don’t close the deals. The salespeople do (when they’re actually selling). Read You Can’t Build Your Way Out of Constipated Revenue

There are half as many extrinsically (money) motivated salespeople today as there were 30 years ago, and most of them are concentrated in the top 5% of all salespeople. I don’t have specific data on my next comment, but anecdotally, that same group of successful salespeople is the one sales leaders complain about when it comes to keeping their CRM app up to date. They protect their selling time. The rest of the sales force spends too much of it on everything else.

The analog truck didn’t have a better engine. It just didn’t have anything else fighting for my attention. I drove better because there was nothing to do except drive. The best salespeople do the same thing. They treat the technology as the truck’s dashboard—useful when they need it, ignored when they don’t—and they spend the day selling. Everyone else treats the technology as the job. Read Why Sales Pipelines Are Optical Illusions. Could sales leaders be driving that perceived job description?

The interesting thing is that Sales Enablement’s incorporation and use of tools interferes with coaching, motivation, accountability, pipeline management, sales process, and proper performance expectations. Expectations are not only all over the place, some leaders aren’t sure what those expectations should be. We can help you sort that out.

The question isn’t whether you should have the tools. The question is whether the tools are helping you sell, or whether they’ve become the thing you and your sales team are doing instead of selling. The top 5% of salespeople already know the answer.