Winning the mental game

How to want to do things you don't want to do

Snyder’s Law states that anything that CAN be used as an excuse to avoid sales, WILL be used as an excuse to avoid sales.

We’re all smart people here. If we really focus on it - selling, that is - we can both figure out sales and, more importantly, figure out what people really want to buy.

But we don’t really focus on sales, and instead we tend to try to avoid it. Despite knowing we shouldn’t be avoiding sales. It just… happens. And doesn’t feel good.

Or, we do the work of selling, but we hate the work. It sucks. We do it grudgingly every day, wishing we could be doing anything else. We’re never going to get good at something we hate doing, which makes us hate it more.

On the other side of this - when we lean into sales and actually feel good leaning into sales - life is so much better.

How do we get there? We have to change our minds. We have to want to do the thing we don’t currently want to do.

Here are two reframes I’ve found useful. Pick your favorite and try it.

1: “Sales is like playing a video game.”

Instead of thinking of doing cold outreach and sales as if it’s this scary, awful, painful thing… look at it as a video game. We’ve gotta figure out how to win the game.

And that’s the point: When it’s a video game, I just want to win the game. It’s not about me being right, and there’s nothing wrong with me being bad at the video game to start. I take my ego out of it, and it’s all about the outcome.

Got a bad response to outbound? Ok… let me play that level again and fix it. Not a reflection of my intelligence or worth. Same if I have a brutal sales call, or make some dumbass mistake somewhere else. The answer is always to figure out what went wrong and replay the level.

2: “Selling is like being a detective.”

Instead of looking at sales as pushing, persuading, and convincing - which makes us naturally not want to do it - look at it as being a detective, hunting for demand.

Who really needs to change? Why? We’re on the case. Let’s get to ground truth. Someone’s not a fit? They don’t get our product? Interesting clues… need to go get out into the world to get more clues to figure this out. Need to talk to more potential suspects, figure out exactly what they’re trying to do, and why.

Bonus: We can view “finding PMF” like it’s detective work too - and when we do, we’re less likely to just theorize and whiteboard and do useless research. We need to get to ground truth, which is in our customers’ worlds and minds.

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PS:

• Registration for the last PMF Camp for a while closes today! If you desperately need to join it and missed the registration, please email me ASAP at rob@reframeb2b.com

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