In sales we put the other person first. Our job is to listen to understand. The salesperson who is thinking about themselves, their target, their pitch, their outcome, is the salesperson who misses what the buyer is actually telling them.
When we interview for sales roles at Outsold, one of the things we screen for is strong opinion in either direction. Too far left, too far right, too certain about anything that divides people. Not because we have no views of our own, but because tribalism is the opposite of inclusivity. A salesperson who walks into a room already sorting people into categories has closed off part of their ability to listen before the conversation even starts.
A Simple Test
There is a remarkably reliable way to determine what kind of person you are dealing with, and it takes about thirty seconds to apply once you know what to listen for.
Ask yourself whether the person in front of you uses the word “us” or the word “them.”
That is it. That is the whole test.
People who use “us” or ‘we’ tend to hold an egalitarian view of the world. They operate from a baseline assumption that people are fundamentally equal regardless of background, belief, status, wealth, or any other distinguishing factor. They are oriented toward finding common ground.
People who use “they” and “them” create distinctions. They draw perimeters. They sort people into groups and apply preference based on which group someone belongs to. The “them” framework is old thinking. It is built on fear and on a need for boundaries that the evidence of a well-lived life tends to dissolve.
The Highlanders and the French
A friend of mine, an archaeologist, explained this dynamic with a story that I have never forgotten.
A thousand years ago, the McAlisters in the Scottish Highlands hated the McAndrews from over the hill. One wore green tartan. The other wore blue. That was completely intolerable. Sufficient reason for conflict.
Then they learned to ride horses and travelled further, and met the English. Suddenly the McAlisters and the McAndrews were Scottish brothers. They had found a new “them.” They were united against the English, who did not even wear tartan.
A few hundred years later they built boats and went further still, and met the French. Now the English and the Scots were not so different after all. At least they were from the same island. But the French. The French were another matter entirely.
What he was pointing at is that the circle of “us” expands in direct proportion to how much of the world you have seen and how many different kinds of people you have genuinely encountered. The more you travel, the more opinions you hear, the more food you share across different tables, the more the distinctions that once seemed significant start to look like the difference between green and blue tartan. Real, to the people who cared about them. Essentially arbitrary, from any meaningful distance.
What This Has to Do With Selling
Everything.
The more you operate from “us” thinking, the more effectively you can do the thing that actually determines sales outcomes, which is walk in the other person’s shoes. Understand their situation from the inside. Hear what they are saying without filtering it through your own framework of what they should want or what they should do.
Empathetic listening is not a technique you apply. It is a disposition you either have or you develop. And it is undermined immediately by any version of “them” thinking, by bad-mouthing competitors, by voicing strong opinions that divide, by making assumptions about what a buyer values based on how you have categorised them before they had a chance to tell you who they actually are.
Strong opinion in any direction creates barriers. No matter how correct your opinion is, politics has no place in sales. Your buyer may not want to play the same track you are laying down. Any opinion that splits the room, halves the pool of potential customers. But more to the point people with strong opinion tell others how to behave or what to think, which is the polar opposite of sales.
Leave your opinions out of it. Bring your curiosity instead. The salesperson who genuinely wants to understand the person across from them is always more effective than the one who has already decided what they think.
Or what you should think.
