Not all sales are the same. Some are really straightforward, transactional. Others are long-term, complex. Lots of different people involved.

People use the word committees.

But groups, individuals, with sometimes conflicting interests or undefined interests or when there's something new that comes about,

who owns this? Who's responsible for it? Who cares about this?

Sounds complex, doesn't it? That's what we're going to be talking about today is what happens when your deals are really complex.

How do you manage them? How do you think about them? How do you win them?

And I think when you look at the most complex, it can't seem overwhelming, but it can also be a great metaphor for your deals that might be less complex.

And a lot of people look at processes like some rigid thing and it's like, no, you just got to understand the game board, the field, the parameters, the process, the system that you're working within.

And to understand where you are and where you need to go and how to get there and how not to fall into the traps and the delays and the misconceptions about what's really going on within the account.

And one of the fastest and easiest ways to do this is to align it with what you're already good at.

Now we're all good at something, you know, it might be a sport, it might be cooking, it might be partying, it might be a lot of different things, but whatever it is, we're good at it for a reason.

We did a lot of reps, we might have had some innate talent, it might be a desire to be good at it.

But those metaphors transfer into selling.

Instead of looking at selling as this whole new skill set that we have to learn.

And one of the things that I've really learned this summer was that the deeper you get into these other things, including sales, the deeper you want to get.

You become intrigued, mystified by it, and the more you get into it, the more you appreciate it.

So let's get into this interview. This has been a real enjoyable one because the guest basically took a lot of his skills that he learned doing management consulting and applied them to these large complex sales.

And when you learn about this, the word sales, people just, they get the wrong impression.

And I just feel like puke and sometimes when I see these comments, the best way to sell is not to sell at all.

When I say sale, I don't mean the persuasion part of it.

I mean the process, you're guiding somebody through this journey, this organization, you're changing the way they're doing business.

And too many reps make the mistake of relying on the client to know how to do this.

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