Tackle The Monkey First
WMMM #031 - This week I share a perspective that may help you improve your craft.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter August 26, 2023 4 min read
Tackle The Monkey First
Astro
In the summer of 2019, I went to work at Google. Thomas Kurian had left Oracle and was now the CEO of Google Cloud. Thomas needed people who knew how to conduct business with enterprise companies. I was there to help Thomas do just that.
In early fall, we hosted the executive team from the world's second-largest card payment company for a briefing at Googleplex, our global headquarters in Mountain View.
While out there, I made time to acclimate to every aspect of the place.
Even though a motion picture ("The Internship") provides a glimpse of it, and you can find hundreds of YouTube videos about it, words cannot describe the vibe you feel when you are there.
I engaged a few fellow Googlers in conversation, and they shared some of the stories about Google that had become famous.
One was about this Googler whose time was in high demand - he was a "blue sky thinker."
The Googleplex campus is so large and sprawls across several different buildings that he struggled to get from one meeting to the next.
They told me to watch for a guy with longish hair speeding his way through the halls on rollerblades.
This guy's name was Astro Teller. His title was Captain of Moonshots for Google X.
Parts of my content in today's edition are borrowed from a blog by Astro in 2016.
Don't use up all your resources on the easy stuff
From Astro:
"Let's say you're trying to teach a monkey how to recite Shakespeare while on a pedestal. How should you allocate your time and money between training the monkey and building the pedestal?
The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the pedestal. But I bet at least a couple of people will rush off and start building a really great pedestal first.
Why?
Because at some point the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update — and you want to be able to show off something other than a long list of reasons why teaching a monkey to talk is really, really hard.
I get it.
It's human nature to want the boss to say, "Hey, nice pedestal, great job!" and think of your authentic Elizabethan-era carving techniques when you're up for promotion instead of the long list of monkey-training techniques that have failed so far.
It takes a lot of faith in your boss (and the bosses above) to think that he or she will say a hearty thank you for helping to figure out whether and for how long your organization should invest resources in advanced monkey education."
Focus on the Behaviors, and the Results will follow
Astro's analogy is a perfect fit for the sales profession.
The game of sales is so misunderstood.
Sales is really, really hard.
It is common to witness knowledgeable individuals believing they know why sales happen, what it takes to win business, and dispensing advice without ever "carrying a bag."
It is so common that we should expect this to happen and plan for it.
Why?
Intelligence is an attribute that will propel one into positions of authority, like startup Founders and C-Suite roles in established companies.
We need to be beholden to accommodating authority.
This often means allocating a fraction of our efforts to "building that pedestal."
It doesn't have anything to do with teaching that monkey Shakespeare, but it is part of the behavior required to be successful in sales.
Building the Pedestal
Along the way, we can drop hints to "authority" that enable them to discover more about the sales game for themselves.
The vocabulary we use plays a role.
The most accomplished sales professionals don't get people to "buy what they are selling" because of how much they "know" about the product, the industry, or even the client.
They don't make sales because people value their friendship (not enterprise sales.)
The best help enterprises "make a decision" through a process that allows stakeholders to discover for themselves a time-sensitive need uniquely solved by a solution they enable.
It is too ambitious to attempt to teach someone what we do with the limited time we can find to do so.
Instead, use words and phrases like "help them buy," "self-discover," "reveal," "make a decision," and "desired outcome" versus "sell," "deal," "convince," "teach," and "close."
Invest in “authority” using the same principles that you use with prospects.
Tackle that Monkey
But keep sight of the objective.
Tackle that monkey.
We prioritize our efforts and time on "getting that monkey to recite Shakespeare" - executing the behaviors required to be successful when selling to enterprises.
More from Astro:
"Our Foghorn team, which developed a way to turn seawater into carbon-neutral liquid fuel, did a good job focusing on their monkey. While not as simple as carving a pedestal, building the core technology to generate the fuel was a relatively straightforward task.
Their hardest and most urgent challenge was determining whether they could make their fuel cost competitive. If they couldn't prove it was possible within 5 years, we wouldn't continue to invest in the project. Ultimately, they decided to kill their own project, to free up X resources for moonshots that were more likely to succeed in the next few years."
And not every sales opportunity results in new business for our employer.
We can't measure ourselves purely on the results of individual sales outcomes.
We move to the next one and focus on executing the desired behaviors.
The desired results will follow.
H/T Astro Teller
This week is the ninth of ten editions without a sales story in favor of a summer series of Mastering Useless Information (Be Interesting, Interested.)
Win More, Make More goes "Back to School" on September 9 with a special edition to kick off the school year. September 11, 2001, fell on a Monday, as it does this year. I honor that day in the Sept. 9th newsletter.
A Preview of "Back to School" Sales Stories
The Origin of the ULA
When "No" didn't mean "No" - one of many AT&T sales stories
The Verizon Story
The Vartec Story
The JC Penney Story
The Southwest Airlines Story
The DISH Network Story
The Amazon.com Story
Thank you for reading,
Jeff
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