Consider this scenario.
You’re a sales leader responsible for a team tasked with winning deals in a B2B environment.
You have a solid sales process, strong data and detailed reporting.
Your team is enthusiastic, busy and doing what’s asked of them.
Yet results still feel harder to generate than they should..
Sound familiar? For many sales leaders – from player-coach managers to CROs – this is a recurring challenge. Sales leadership remains one of the least understood and least supported roles in business, which is why so many teams respond by adding more: more tools, more process and more pressure. The result is often the opposite of what they need – more stress, more wasted time, more cost and less revenue.
And yet, when you look back at the moments that really moved the needle – a major deal won, a stalled opportunity revived, a referral generated, a partnership deepened – those breakthroughs were rarely created by a tool, a dashboard or a perfectly followed process. More often, they came from something more human: a strong conversation, a fresh perspective or an interaction that created genuine trust.
The Real Unlock in Sales
This ability to have brilliant conversations and be creative is less of a focus in a modern sales setting where everyone is trying to shortcut and automate yet central to business success.
Ever wished as a leader your team could be confident dealing with C-Suite like you are?
Wish they could all deliver the presentation so you didn’t have to be everywhere all at once?
Want them to have the confidence to be their authentic selves yet you still try and teach them to sell by rote?
How much time do you invest in giving them these skills?
Do you know how?
Why a More Human Way to Sell Matters
Sales today takes humility, understanding, curiosity, empathy, courage, vulnerability and more.
Some of the founding principles of The Humble Sale. But what sector can one turn to where these qualities are rich, take the lessons and apply them to our sales world? Answer: the theatre.
“An actor should always let humility outweigh ambition”. Anna Kendrick.
At The Humble Sale we use the techniques of theatre to help companies achieve sales “performance”
What Theatre Can Teach Us About Sales Performance
Actors preparing to inhabit characters in a play follow processes that are directly relevant and helpful to a modern seller.
They work on the detail of interaction – appearance, tone of voice, physicality, body language and more. They pre-plan their script, make it sound natural. They get under the skin of their character, perform deep research. Crucially they rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. They are prepared for all the eventualities of live performance, every word and movement second nature.
Casts are assembled based on the correct mix of unique skills not a team of carbon copy actors with similar strengths. The supporting production team of technical personnel, marketeers, script-writers, story-tellers and more are all aligned behind the same common goal as the actors with everyone sharing a collective sense of purpose and mission.
They all face the same levels of urgency, opening night is opening night, things can’t slip and the team ensures everything is delivered and ready.
You get the idea.
Imagine a seller being coached like an actor to have confidence to walk into a room and own it.
Imagine a salesperson developing excellent natural curiosity and vulnerability so they are confident enough to have really human conversations with buyers, get to a deep understanding and picture themselves walking a day in their shoes; to provide help at a more thorough level than ever before. Imagine recruiting a team of salespeople or marketeers based on uniqueness, different skills all woven into one effective selling group, with superb collaboration and shared purpose.
Imagine how fun it would be and how much your customers would love you.
Sometimes the answers don’t come from the industry we are in, but another angle where the lessons are more potent and relevant than we ever imagined.
Definitely time to shine a Spotlight on Sales.
🎭 Book a Guest Speaker
Our Founder, Ben Gaston, is available to speak at Conferences or Sales Kick-Off Events, promising a more fun, interactive and memorable take on Sales Performance to inspire your team. Reach out here to book a friendly, informal chat about your needs.
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