In the past week, I’ve participated in two reviews where the sales person has made the statement about some individual in the buying group, “So and so is incompetent…..”
One wanted to hammer home the fact by saying, “I spoke to a friend selling other products to the same company, he agrees….So and So is incompetent!” It was, apparently, validation for that sales person’s position.
Naturally, statements like these provoke the question, “What is it about that person’s behavior that causes you to draw that conclusion?”
Usually, there is a lot of hemming, hawing, and hand waving, followed by, “I can’t get to see them!” or “They won’t do what I need them to do!” or “They are biased toward the competitors!” or “They are too tough to deal with, they just don’t get it!”
And I am forced to ask, “How is that a demonstration of their competence?” (There is a hidden implication in that question, re-read it to make sure you get it.)
Whenever I hear this sales people making these statements, it makes my blood boil. Universally, it’s because we can’t get the customer to do what we want them to do, or more generally, we aren’t getting what we want.
It has nothing to do with their competence. Most of the time, they are simply doing their jobs!
Sometimes, I push the sales people on their assessments. We dive into the person’s background and behavior, trying to understand the sales person’s assessment. In one of the last situations, the “incompetent customer,” had held her job of a number of years. In fact her profile indicated a number of awards she had gotten from management. I posed the question to the sales person, “It appears this person is doing her job, actually it seems her management appreciates and recognizes the job she has done, so why is she incompetent?”
To my mind, incompetence is an excuse used by too many sales people. It’s laziness, selling error, mistakes, inability (or incompetence) on the sales person’s part. They haven’t taken the time to figure out how to engage the individual, they haven’t taken the time to learn about the individual, they haven’t taken the time to figure out why the individual should meet with them or do what the sales person wants them to do.
Thinking a person is incompetent is possibly not only inaccurate, but also dangerous. It colors how we think of them, engage them, even the tone in our voices. Inevitably, these are telegraphed to the “incompetent” customer.
As a personal example, increasingly, I find myself at the receiving end of people thinking I am incompetent. There are a number of things that I know I am incompetent on, but usually none of those are involved in these conversations.
Often, there are the words that are said, “But you are an old guy, things have changed, you don’t understand…..” Yes, I’m an old guy–it happens to all of us (we should hope that it happens to all of us, the alternative is unacceptable.) But I get that things have changed, in fact regular readers might say I am an instigator of much of that change. Stated differently, I’m not as dumb as I look.
Often, people don’t say those words, but you can hear it in their voices. For the other “old people” reading this, you know that patronizing tone.
While we may think we are hiding our opinions/assessments of people, it is impossible not to telegraph what we think of people to them. I sit in hundreds of meetings and these behaviors smack you in the face. Whether it’s body language, subtle facial expressions, the tone of how we speak to the person, whether we even listen to the person; our attitudes are telegraphed not only to that individual but to everyone else in the meeting.
And this limits us!
It keeps us from hearing, understanding. It keeps us from learning. It keeps us from accomplishing what we want to accomplish. It is the ultimate conceit and sign of disrespect.
We may agree or disagree with many people, including our customers. We may like or dislike many people we encounter. There may be differences in performance levels.
But claiming a person as incompetent only demonstrates our own ignorance, weaknesses, and inability to figure out how to connect with and engage the people we need to engage to get what we want to have happen.
When we make statements about people’s incompetence, we are more likely making observations about our own competence.
