Improving B2B Sales Productivity Requires A Better Balance Between Data and Attention

Peter Nicholson, President of the Council of Canadian Academies, notes how profoundly we've become information rich: the costs/unit of capturing, storing, and transmitting data have declined 10 million fold since the early 1960's. "It's as if a house that cost half a million dollars in 1964 could be bought today for a nickel."

He goes on to note that as we've become information rich, we've become attention poor. It's triggered a knock-on effect - an erosion of the deep, integrative, learning that can only come from 10,000 hours of focused effort. What's required, in his view, is a more balanced tradeoff between the depth of what we know and the speed with which we can retrieve it. This, in turn, will require creating new ways of interacting with information and colleagues that create a 'peripheral intellectual vision' with which deep insights can accrue.

In my view, his observations carry important implications for improving sales productivity. We're seeing some of the most profound advances in B2B sales productivity coming from sales people who are attacking the scarcity of their prospects' attention with deep insights. They're creating significant value for their prospects by creating a vision of the possible. Doing so gains their prospects' attention. As Reps do it over and over again, their deep insights become habitual. Their methods for producing insights are learned through feedback, creative habits, and hours of practice; craftsmanship emerges.