Sell Well, Do Good: DQ Selling for Social Enterprises
Roy Whitten and Scott Roy
178 pages, Niche Pressworks, 2021
Social entrepreneurs are dreamers, bringing new thinking to old problems. Unfortunately, when they don’t bring their curiosity, humility, and intelligence to the business activity that determines whether they will succeed or fail—the activity of selling the product or service they have created—many see their dream become a waking nightmare.
Too many business leaders invest massive effort into market analysis, product design, supply chain development, and sophisticated smartphone apps, and then, when it comes to selling—the final yard of the proverbial Last Mile, the distance separating a seller from a buyer—they stop. They stop analyzing, designing, and innovating. They just go along with the crowd. They regard selling as a black box, a necessary evil, and they recruit, train, and manage sellers in the same old ineffective and brand-compromising ways that it's been done for decades. And soon, they wake up to hordes of dissatisfied customers, slippery sales staff, and callous managers who treat their agents in ways that the entrepreneurs themselves wouldn’t tolerate for a moment.
This tragedy happens all the time, but they can avoid falling into its trap: if they open their eyes and know where to look; if they know how to understand what they find; and if social entrepreneurs know how to develop a sales system that aligns with the values and innovation they brought to the development of their offering.
Our book Sell Well, Do Good shows social entrepreneurs how to do these things, and more. Consider it the missing piece of professional education. It cracks open the black box of selling. It reveals the disturbing core convictions on which salespeople and their managers often operate. It offers a new paradigm for selling, and it shows how to design a selling system unique to and aligned with the values and best practices of social enterprise.
In this extract from the third chapter of Sell Well, Do Good—after exploring the selling challenges social entrepreneurs face—we start to address the fascinating, creative, and disciplined transformation that entrepreneurs can undertake to fulfill those dreams that get them up each morning.—Roy Whitten and Scott Roy
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When social entrepreneurs acknowledge that they must become as expert at selling as they are at product innovation, things change. Erica Mackey, co-founder and former COO of Off-Grid Electric (now Zola), shared her experience in Tanzania: “When you try to hire local salespeople, you find that either they’ve never sold before, or they’ve only sold fast-moving consumer goods. You just can’t sell pay-as-you-go solar to individual consumers and small businesses in the same way you sell SIM cards and cigarettes.”
Eduardo Bontempo, cofounder of Brazilian education platform Geekie, had a similar insight into sales managers. We shared with him our observation that social entrepreneurs often go outside their organization to “find experienced sales managers.” He laughed and said, “Well, I’ve made that mistake. We worked with you to develop a selling system, and we trained our managers to use it. They kept our sales agents on track, and it worked.” He paused a moment, as though to emphasize his next point. “And then we launched an expansion and hired managers from the outside whom we just didn’t have the time to train. They brought their own ideas about selling, and now, half of our sales force is working against the other half. I’m going to x this, and from now on, we won’t ‘hire’ sales managers. Instead, we’ll train them in the system we have developed.”
Lisa Mikkelsen from Flourish Ventures had an insight as to why social entrepreneurs pay so little attention to both the system of selling and the development of the people who run the system. “It’s unfortunate,” she said, “but many social entrepreneurs think that anyone can sell—that it’s just a matter of telling people to get out there and do it. And the same is true of sales managers.” She thought a moment and then concluded, “Actually, they just haven’t thought about sales in any sort of critical or deep way.” And that is the unnoticed baggage that many social entrepreneurs bring with them to their work. They may have consciously left behind the trappings and purposes of traditional, commercial enterprise, but often they are still hindered by old ways of thinking about selling.
All of the social entrepreneurs with whom we’ve worked have sooner or later had to crack open what our client Mike Roberts from International Development Enterprises (iDE) called the black box of selling: discovering what it actually is and what it takes to make it work. This is the point at which we usually engage social entrepreneurs for the first time: when things are going wrong. Nearly always, their companies are missing their sales targets. Often, they are trying to scale, fend off competition, or increase penetration of their market to achieve the impact they desire. It’s challenges like this that reveal the deficiencies in their approach to selling. It’s a painful and creative space, filled with new possibilities because old practices have failed to produce the desired results.
Poor selling and dysfunctional sales management cost companies time, money, and energy, all of which are already in short supply. When the initial passion for doing good starts fading in a sales force, complaints arise about things like unreasonable sales targets, bad territory, unfair compensation, and long hours. Sales curves start to flatten, even decline. Turnover in staff accelerates with missed targets, and performance milestones are missed. Customers start complaining about the way they are being treated—before and after they buy—and the most valuable commodity of all, the company’s reputation, begins to suffer.
But here is where social entrepreneurs have an advantage over many of their commercial counterparts. They care deeply about the mission they’re on and the impact they want to make. This sense of mission is what has been called Deep Desire. This hunger—to do good—is what drives them to shine a light on the critical activity that needs their attention. They start asking two questions: “How do we actually sell?” and “What isn’t working?”
They bring to their search the same open-mindedness, curiosity, and determination they originally brought to the founding of their enterprise and the innovation of their products and services. Invariably, social entrepreneurs discover that they and their colleagues have been locked into a system of behavior that the science of transformative learning refers to as a paradigm—a set of processes and practices people default to whenever they think about, plan for, or engage in “selling.”
Paradigms are surprisingly resistant to change. From inside the paradigm, everything makes sense—it feels like you have to do things a certain way, even if they don’t work particularly well. Furthermore, you can’t just talk people out of their paradigm. One writer said that getting people to understand the paradigm in which they’re stuck is like trying to get them to bite their own faces. Another described it as talking about freedom to prisoners who have forgotten that there’s a life outside the prison walls.
Transformational science identifies ways to shift established paradigms. First, you have to help people see what they are losing, the price they are paying for continuing to operate as they are. Then, you must help them uncover the assumptions and convictions that underlie how they’ve been behaving. You shine a light on the things that “everyone knows for sure that just ain’t so,” and then you see who wakes up to what’s been happening. Then, if these people can experience behaving in a new way—if they can see and hear the benefit of doing so—things can actually change...and quickly.
There is often one central conviction at the heart of every paradigm, something that everyone is so “absolutely sure of” that no one asks if it’s really so. Kevin Starr, CEO of the Mulago Foundation, had this figured out from the moment we met him. “Everybody thinks,” he said, “that selling is all about hustling stuff.” Brilliant! This ubiquitous belief—that selling is fundamentally pitching and persuading people to buy—drives sales agents to deliver convincing arguments before finding out what their potential customers actually want and need. Salespeople talk instead of listening, and they pitch instead of inquiring. And, of course, customers expect to be hustled or even lied to. When salespeople come to their doors, they actually ask to be pitched: What are you selling, and how much does it cost?
Furthermore, this conviction—that selling is persuading people to buy stuff—has a detrimental effect on the entire sales team. Most sellers don’t actually enjoy doing what it takes to constantly convince and persuade other human beings to buy from them.
And, since hustling isn’t inherently satisfying, sales managers have to convince their salespeople to keep doing what they don’t enjoy: pitching, pursuing, and pressuring their customers to buy. How do they do this? By doing their own pitching, pursuing, and pressuring using both carrots and sticks to get salespeople to work long hours, hit their targets, and pressure their customers to buy...or else.
When social entrepreneurs see this paradigm at work in their own organization—the organization they built from the ground up, often at a significant personal sacrifice, now struggling to fulfill its mission—they often feel two powerful emotions: embarrassment at what they overlooked and determination to be as brilliant in their selling as they have been in the development of their products. They’re ready to break out of the prison that the old paradigm of selling has kept them in and create something entirely new: a selling system and a way of executing it that aligns with the good they wanted to do in the first place.
Now, they are ready for selling in a way that changes behavior—for the customer, for the salesperson, for the manager—for everyone involved in the sales process.