I started my sales career as a kindergarten teacher. Many of the strategies I use today in sales, I learned as a teacher. Here’s one.
An infamous quote in education which you've surely heard before is "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach".
It's from George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Man and Superman’ and I would strongly discourage the reader from quoting it in the presence of teachers. You'll get responses ranging from strong indignation to outright visceral lashing.
Personally, I never quite saw the fuss. Even in my teaching days, I was never insulted by the statement and found it to be somewhat of a reverse backhanded comment, if there is such a thing. Let me explain.
In education, there is a widely known concept called the ‘the curse of knowledge’. It's a cognitive bias that states that once you've learned something, you can't unlearn it.
Anyone who has been to college or university has experienced a professor who was an expert in their field but couldn't teach if their life depended on it. The reason is that when a professor teaches, he assumes that the students have the same background knowledge as he does. Not realizing all the connections and hierarchy of knowledge required to level-up. This is why the bias is also referred to as the "curse of expertise".
As a classroom teacher, I was often afflicted by this curse. When I first started teaching kindergarten, I was confounded by having to teach 5 year-olds how to print letters. It seems innocuous enough until you realize you have spent the better part of your life writing cursive.
You don't use cursive letters in kindergarten, you use block letters. I actually had to train myself on how to write in block letters. This exercise turned me into a student and in doing so, I had to break apart all the steps required to write in block letters. This provided me with the blueprint to teach my students.
There's an interesting observation often shared among teachers that suggests that the best math teachers are often those who struggled with math as students. Why? Because they are intuitively aware of the hierarchy of knowledge required to learn a difficult subject like math. You can’t teach multiplication before teaching addition. Every subject has a hierarchy of knowledge and writing is no exception.
Funny enough, a few years later, I found myself teaching grade 4. I was now back to writing cursive but due to my years of writing in block letters, I had forgotten how to write in cursive! I had to re-teach myself and actually spent lots of time researching cursive writing in order to find the best methodology.
What made me a good writing teacher was precisely what I couldn't do. My superpower as a teacher was that I was able to break down what others do and teach it to those who can't do. A skill that most experts aren’t trained for.
As I became a sales professional, I realized that the same applies to sales. I've spent the majority of my sales career selling software but I can't code if my life depended on it. It is precisely because I can't code that I am able to sell software. Just like I did as a teacher, I am able to take a complex piece of software and convey to the prospect how it is going to change their life. Something that a software engineer would have no idea how to do.
This is the superpower of both teachers and sales professionals. They are able to communicate ideas without being afflicted by ‘the curse of knowledge". The cornerstone of a sales professional’s role should be to educate the prospect. There’s an inherent duty to level up prospects and fill their knowledge gap. That knowledge comes from the sales professional speaking with countless other prospects in similar situations and building a bank of insights that can be shared with the prospect at opportune moments - what a teacher would refer to as ‘teachable moments’.
In essence, the Discovery Call, which is the starting point of most sales deals, is an opportunity to look for gaps in the prospect’s hierarchy of knowledge. Those gaps become teachable moments where the sales professional can provide valuable and thoughtful insights to the prospect. This is what makes selling so aligned with teaching. They are really two sides of the same coin.
So, to sales professionals I proudly proclaim: ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, sell’!
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If you are a teacher or former teacher, I would love to hear teacher/student stories that you think are applicable to sales. Just DM me on LinkedIn.
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