Like most baseball fans, I stayed up way too late watching the MLB All Star game. I was happy to finally see the National League win this annual event. It is hard to believe it was 1996 when they last won. I was especially glad to see the Duluth hometown boy win the MVP award. Brian McCann was in the same class as my oldest daughter in high school. Not only do I have that connection to him, but I have been an Atlanta Braves fan all my life.
When I spoke with our office’s Boston native (and fan), we had the normal discussion about National League versus American League. For those of you who are not baseball fans, the main argument is that because of the use of a designated hitter in the American League the game has much less strategy than the National League. The comeback for the American League fans is that their league’s games are more exciting because they score more runs. They also claim that their players have more talent. After seeing the results of this year’s All Star Game I guess the American League’s talent doesn’t pack as much punch as they used to. Okay, it was only one game, but when it has been 14 years since their last defeat you tend to relish these rare occasions.
All this talk about baseball spurred me to think about how Simple Sales and Complex Sales are much like the two leagues in baseball. When you think about simple short-term type sales, there is significantly less strategy involved than in a longer-term, complex sale situation. Even though this is usually the case, maybe it is just that the strategy happens at a different time in the sales process. You see if you are selling a product that has a very short sales process, it is more likely to be about the product and the positioning of that product before the sales person even gets involved. For the sales person in the short sales process it is all about closing; for development and marketing it is about the strategy to create the right product and position that product so that the sales person will have the chance to close the sale. In a more complex sale the sales person is more focused on planning and strategy than closing. If they do these things correctly it will close itself.
Taking all this back to baseball, in the American League the strategy is more about getting the right players for the team and positioning them correctly than it is about making strategic decisions during the game. I prefer the National League and I prefer the complex sale, but there is room and a need for both.
Until next time:
I wish I had an answer to that because I'm tired of answering that question.
Yogi Berra
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