Daniel Pink presents a new ABC framework for sales: Attunement, the ability to see things from another's perspective; Buoyancy, the resilience to handle rejection; and Clarity, the skill to filter information and spot patterns. The real premium skill now is problem-finding, not problem-solving, positioning salespeople as guides who help customers recognize challenges they didn't know they had.
Managers, leaders inside of organizations are spending huge amounts of time doing this. And I think the way to do it better is what I call the new ABCs: attunement, buoyancy, and clarity. A, attunement, perspective-taking. How do you understand someone else's perspective? B, buoyancy. I love this phrase. When you're in sales, every day you face an ocean of rejection. The buoyancy is how do you remain buoyant on an ocean of rejection? What do you do before? What do you do during? What do you do after? And then clarity is, we got a lot of information, so accessing information doesn't give you much of an advantage. What matters more is being able to curate the information, filter the information, make sense of it, detect patterns in the information. The second thing— and not only through data analytics and things like that, but just being able to sort of synthesize the information on your own— the second thing is, premium has moved from problem solving as a skill to problem finding. That if a customer or prospect knows precisely what their problem is, if I can articulate, identify exactly what my problem is, I can probably find a solution. But you're more useful if I don't know what my problem is, or if I'm wrong about my problem.
