Common sense is not that common

Recently I spoke with a CEO over the phone, and he shared that his former vice president of sales had spoken with me a couple years before.

When their former vice president of sales had called me, he was fairly new with the organization. He has been recruited through a headhunter, and the company had paid to relocate him to Oklahoma City. Then they gave him plenty of resources so that he could grow their sales.

One of the things the VP was doing was setting up sales training. He ended up talking to me and a few other organizations, and ended up not doing business with Sandler.

Flash forward to the phone call with the CEO a couple years later. The CEO shared with me, "Yeah, turns out he really wasn't very good."

Always digging in to find out more, I asked, "What do you mean?"

He shared, "He came to me and shared what sales development training organization he was going with. I had heard of Sandler, so asked, 'Why not Sandler?'"

Here's what the vice president of sales shared with him: "Everything that Sandler helps with is common sense, and we would be fools to invest in that."

The organization ended up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars they invested in the vice president and the team he built because, as the CEO shared it with me over the phone, "Apparently common sense is not that common."

We help clients learn new ways of thinking about sales, including specific techniques. A common response is, "That's not that hard!"

I like to use the analogy of breaking up a rock. The concept of using a hammer to break up a rock is pretty simple. But that doesn't mean it's easy. There's a reason we have prisoners on a chain gang do it!

On many levels, what we teach is common sense. But are you actually putting that "common sense" into practice?