Crippled Selling, Wounded Warriors, and Misfit Sales Technology.

Sales has become the ultimate business battle ground.

Like storied legends of past world wars, salesmen crouch dangerously on the front lines of combat. Round after round, they rise from the trenches to run bayonet forward into the stench of war. Many never to return. Others to crawl back wounded.

And just as war has evolved into a sophisticated landscape of un-manned endeavors, so too has sales and marketing.

What used to be done with a pair of legs, a healthy back , and a survivor’s serving of gumption has been replaced by a bevy of heat-seeking sales technology services.

And it’s crippling our sales soldiers.

• Instead of being memorable and reliable, we plug 47 messages into a demand generation platform and hope our high-intelligent “drip campaign” cajoles semi-interested bystanders to take an interest in our wares.
• Instead of using a healthy dose of common sense, relentless enthusiasm, and a keen sense of priority ,we hope that complicated lead scoring analytics can tell us who is the faster buyer in our stack of prospects.
• Instead of engendering curiosity and a sense of excellence in our teams, we would rather just use a sales force automation system to fire off mediocre tasks and a hopelessly scripted sales process.
• Instead of taking the time to invest with love and empathy in the success of those we encounter, we just throw notes in a customer relationship management platform and hope against hope that activity eventually equals revenue.
• Instead of being creative leaders and looking past industry peer pressure, we pile our “buy now” tweets into our social media management solution and sit back waiting for our Facebook community to make us rich.

We’ve got sales all wrong.

We don’t have sales problems.

We have soul problems.

Somewhere in the fog and sweat and fear of war, we decided that the agony of the moment wasn’t worth the outcome. We decided that the pain and grit of unrelenting effort wasn’t worth the rewards of immortality.

We don’t need better sales technology. We need better sales warriors.

And we need leaders who can stand tall in front of the troops and inspire. Leaders who carry their fallen brothers from the fight with the promise of never forgetting. Leaders who love and cry and bleed.

That’s not something sales technology can automate, administrate, or attenuate. It’s just an opiate to help us forget the pain of what we’re doing.

It’s still a war.

And we stand here to fight.

We may be beaten by the battle, but we will not be broken.

We will rise to the dawning of a new day and stand unflinching in the face of certain death for we are warriors – men of honor – and that is what we do.

We fight.