Gaurav Kumar is the founder and CEO of Beyond Codes, Inc. and the author of the book ‘Sales Lessons From Golf.’
There is nothing more exciting or more dangerous than a sales professional who can attack the sales game with the strategic mind of a golfer.
I am a bon vivant in sales who fell in love with golf somewhere along the way. These may seem like two separate events in someone’s life, but over time I realized that there are too many similarities between the game of golf and the game of sales to ignore. What I didn’t expect was that golf would make me better at selling, and vice versa.
Golf reflects life
It’s a topic I’ve written about before, but fundamentally, golf resembles life in several ways. You can play it intentionally or carelessly, carefully or carelessly. You can be a good person or cheat. And I’ve found that golf, like life and especially business, gives you back everything you put into it. You can see for yourself what kind of person you are and what kind of person you want to be when you play golf.
I find that once you connect golf and sales in your head, a switch is flipped. Floodgates open between spaces that store golf skills and sales skills. The brain starts firing new cartridges. It feels like while others are looking for their next big “selling secret,” you already have it – it was just locked away in another part of the mind, hidden in plain sight.
These unique sales insights came to me on a golf course. The insights were deep, exciting and rooted in logic. I first tested the real-world applicability of these insights at my own company. After a few successes with smaller value decisions, a day came when I was faced with a difficult decision and a question popped into my mind: If this was the golf course and these two options were in front of me, how would I play my next one? shot? The answer seemed obvious. The result was so profitable that it made me a believer.
An enlightened approach to sales
Sellers get a bad name in the world for being pushy and coercive. Even if they bring solutions that alleviate the pain point for a customer, people can still resist and mistrust. The reason lies in human psychology: most of us hate to be sold, but ironically, we all love to buy. This is a sales professional’s biggest conundrum.
The formula that beats this conundrum came to me on a golf course. A rough way to describe golf is that it is a game where players must get the ball into the hole by hitting, driving, pushing, forcing, and flattering while using the fewest number of strokes. Many people, including many sales professionals, see selling the same way.
We ‘hit’ our prospects and ‘hammer’ the features and benefits to ‘win’ deals. This creates an adversarial relationship and creates a zero-sum game situation where there can only be one winner: a salesperson wins and the customer loses.
An enlightened approach to golf is to imagine that the ball wants to get into the hole and that the golfer is there to help it reach its destination. The ball is not the enemy but a partner with a common goal. It is a player’s job to guide, assist, and help the ball reach the hole. This is a subtle mental shift, but in both golf and sales, mindset is everything.
Translated to sales, this means that the potential customer should feel that the sales professional is their partner helping them achieve their goal. Instead of being a ‘sales pusher’, the salesperson becomes a ‘sales partner’. A sales pusher bombards the prospect with a prepared opening pitch that talks only about what the salesperson wants to say. A sales partner talks to the prospect and asks powerful open-ended questions designed to uncover their deeper needs and pain points. A sales pusher brushes off and argues through objection handling. A sales partner recognizes, reasons and thinks along with the Prospect.
A truly consultative approach means treating your prospects as if they were already your customer and then thinking on their behalf. A great sales partner should even be willing to steer the prospect to a different solution if it eases the prospect’s pain. You’d think no salesperson would ever do that, but let me tell you, the smart ones do. Because when a salesperson approaches a customer with the belief that he has a duty and an obligation to the community he serves, his customers connect with him authentically and for life. This attitude always leads to stronger relationships and more sales.
The key is in the approach shots
Another lesson I learned from golf was about the importance of approach shots. At my company, our sales funnel goes through seven levels: from identifying a prospect to closing a sale. The approach shot equivalent in sales is all the steps that come in between (levels one through six). When I learned that in golf it’s not the first drive or the last putt that determines a golfer’s success or failure, but the approach shots, I trained my sales team to look at the middle stages of the sales funnel differently.
A seasoned sales professional is in no rush to close; in fact, they will even seem to slow down the process in the middle stages to spend time on trust and relationship building. Such professionals enjoy higher closing rates and are inevitably market leaders.
As you can see, there are many ways golf lessons can teach us lessons in business, especially when it comes to sales. From the way you approach your “shots” to the way you play, both golf and business give back based on how much you put in.
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