3.0 The five rules of selling

In the 1980s Honda was on a roll. It had returned to Formula 1 racing in 1984 and cars running Honda engines won the World Championship in 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1991. In 1989, its Accord had become the best selling car in America and in 1986 its luxury brand Acura launched with the legendary Legend. As all of this was happening, Honda wanted to demonstrate its racing prowess on the street in much the same way Ford had done with its Mustang two decades earlier.

Honda had no constraints in existing designs of sportscar and so started from the ground up to build a car that would dominate the luxury sportscar standard of the day: Ferrari. It had to be fast, light, handle perfectly and – a novelty among its peers – be practical and user friendly. The ideals of Formula would be carried over with a high-tech, low fuss approach to the design. An all-aluminium chassis was developed, paired to a powerful, torquey engine demonstrating the best of Honda’s racing experience. Honda used the world’s fastest super-computer, the Cray-2, to make the chassis as stiff as possible, and then handed a test car over to F1 World Champion Ayrton Senna to test at the Nürburgring. He disagreed with the computer, and together he and Honda tested the car for any weaknesses. Whenever they found anything they’d send the information back to Japan for engineers to find a solution. On top of this, unlike almost every other Ferrari or Porsche of the day, they made sure that driver comfort features like air conditioning actually worked. The cockpit was designed by studying the 360 degree field of views that F16 fighter jets enjoyed to make it easy to pilot and the exterior paintwork had a dedicated 23-step process to chemically protect it better from the elements.  

When launched the car was branded the Honda NS-X. It out-braked, out-accelerated, outgripped and outdragged almost every other car out there. Individually any of the strengths Honda had built into the car would have been remarkable but as a package combined it was superlative. Journalists raved about it saying it would put Ferrari out of business. Professional opinion among the motoring industry was near unanimously positive with the view that it had redefined what should be expected from a sportscar.

And then it failed to sell. Initial orders were strong, but after the first two years they slowed to a crawl. At the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s markets for sportscars slowed in general due to a recession meaning there was a lower demand but the problem was bigger than this. The NS-X performed fantastically but it committed the cardinal sin of its category: it was a bit boring. Comfortable, more reliable than a Mercedes Benz, practical, easy to live with, relatively efficient, comparatively spacious – in theory it should have been a no-brainer. But it was a car designed to be perfectly performant from an engineering perspective, not to elicit a quickening of the pulse, dryness of mouth and frisson of excitement. It was a car that people would enjoy driving on a track day, but could picture themselves owning. It was too unaffordable for the people that needed a practical day-to-day car and too unemotive for the people that wanted the allure of a Porsche or a Ferrari. Honda kept the NS-X in production for 15 years but more than half of its sales were in the first two years; Honda failed to sell the NS-X in anywhere close to the numbers it expected because if you wanted to buy one you couldn’t afford it or if you could afford it you couldn’t imagine owning one more than owning one of its competitors.

Sales is not always about selling a product or service. Sales is about selling ideas, next steps and risk. Sales is not just about selling to people. Sales is also about selling with and through people. Marketing is not all about creating qualified leads. It is about priming an audience to become leads, building mindshare, capturing account and contact information and feeding that into leads. Marketing is also about influencing and nurturing opportunities as they progress and in post-sale. Sales and Marketing have a common end goal, but operate over different timelines and objectives. Regardless of the team that people sit in, everyone needs to understand and correctly apply the five rules of selling.

Sales rule 1: You can’t sell to someone that can’t buy

Buyers that have no budget cannot spend money they don’t have (though they can be nurtured to buy later). Buyers that have no authority cannot make decisions they aren’t approved for (though they can influence others). Where do you want to put your sales focus: on a prospect with no decision authority and no budget or one that has both? Where do you want to put your marketing focus? That answer may be different. Today’s out-of-market decision maker may be tomorrow’s hot prospect. People change organisations and roles regularly. By looking over the longer term and at a wider audience, somewhere a buyer with budget and authority can be found and may be influenced to make a purchase if targeted the right way.

Sales rule 2: People need a reason to act

Change and action brings opportunity, but change also brings risk. For most people and organisations looking at change, there are normally more things to do than there is time or budget to do them. As such, any change that doesn’t have a strong need is deprioritised (both intentionally and sometimes unintentionally). Even taking a decision to act is a deviation from the status quo of doing nothing. This is as true for replying to a basic email as it is taking a meeting or agreeing to replace a piece of technology. It is for this reason that legacy technologies persist for decades longer than the technology that underpins them has been relevant. Boeing’s 747-400 aircraft – an update to the original 747 that was first flown in 1969 – was first introduced in 1988. 32 years after they were first flown they remained in service and still relied on 3.5-inch floppy disks to refresh important navigation databases every 28 days. Any change would be a risk, so there is no compelling reason to update them to something more modern. Floppy disks store about 1.5MB of data each at take about 10s to read or write even that tiny amount of data. For some tasks slow isn’t necessarily bad. For younger readers, floppy disks were essentially old technology by the late 1990s due to the extensive availability and low cost of rewritable CDs. Today, they’re mostly known for being the technology that still represents the Save icon in most applications. Another thing that there’s been no compulsion to change.

Sales rule 3: The product is in the mind of the buyer

Whenever there is an election year in the US a popular question feels like it arises: would Jesus vote Democrat or Republican? Both parties attempt to show their faith and claim they are acting under the will of a greater mission, but understanding Jesus's true political leanings is a near impossible task. From a situational perspective the political environment under the Roman Empire is entirely different to that of today, and from an individual lens Jesus words and actions were recorded decades to centuries after his death so separating the words he said from the words he is supposed to have said is highly subjective. In a 2024 survey, Americans were asked to rate where they thought Jesus's fell on a political spectrum. While most felt he was somewhere towards the centre, a number thought he either had strongly leftist leanings or strongly right leanings. The survey also looked at the impact of religious affiliation – whether respondents were Christian or non-Christian – and religiosity – whether they were frequently church goers or not. What the analysis found is that Christians and non-Christians were statistically indistinguishable in their placement of Jesus on the ideological spectrum. Church going similarly appeared to have to impact upon people's perceptions. In other words, the biggest indicator of whether a person thought Jesus had left or right leanings was whether they had left or right leanings. Their own political affiliations where the biggest drivers of their identification of Jesus's political affiliation. This is also known as projection. As the Greek philosopher Xenophanes said "If horses could draw they'd paint their gods like horses."

Rarely – so rarely as to be very nearly ‘never’ – is a product so well defined that a user doesn’t need to envisage it’s impact upon them. Be it the image conveyed by a new suit, the photography that will be possible with an upgraded smartphone, the cost savings that can be realised from an outsourcing agreement or a compliance risk that will now be managed with a new governance technology, buyers project upon any purchase a vision of what they want it to be. Very often, while a product may be cleverly messaged to communicate its differentiated facts, figures, dimensions or stats, the solution delivered, the cost savings recognised, risks mitigated or capabilities enabled will exist in a much more specific way in the mind of the buyer.

Sales rule 4: People make emotional buying decisions for logical reasons.

Roman author, orator and politician Cicero once said on the psychology of decisions that ‘[People] decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.’ Rarely in a purchase decision is there a black-and-white one-way-only option. And if there is, it normally doesn’t last long, such is the nature of competition. As such, objective facts need to be given prioritisation based upon subjective criteria. ‘Solution A is a security accreditation this year from industry organisation XYZ. Ah, but Solution B has five years of Leader status from Analyst QRS.’ Which one you weight most highly will depend upon the emotional connection built against each.

Sales rule 5: Correct use of power is key

Every person-to-person dynamic is a balance of power. Many buyers want to feel like they have the upper hand – they are, after all, the one that will make the final decision and whose career the result ultimately rests upon. But power is also heavily wielded by the seller. Information is power. Information on what is happening in an industry, what peers and competitors are doing, and what the next competitive differentiator could be are all powerful tools that can be deployed at the table. According to The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, power also depends upon credibility and trust. As a seller, putting your organisation on the line to deliver value for a customer means there is joint accountability for success. Trust and credibility are hard won and easily lost, so understanding its value and leveraging the power behind it are key sales skills. These skills also need to be applied when driving consensus among detractors, buying groups and hidden influencers of decision committees by engaging internal stakeholders to extend your power on your behalf.