Most salespeople arrive in their profession in a roundabout way. Most have already spent some time in their industry doing something totally unrelated to selling. But if they get involved, as many do, with supporting the direct efforts of the company’s dealings with the customer, they are often enticed to cross the line—to get permanently involved in the most important customer facing process, that of sales.

A direct result of this circuitous route to the job of selling is that many salespeople never get a logical step-by-step grounding in the language and science of their profession. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that most Universities shy away from implimenting comprehensive programs that teach sales, even though corporate America wants them to do it.

I’m not saying that salespeople don’t get trained, they do. But the training is almost always centered on the immediate needs of the sales team, driven by strategic and tactical considerations. Consequently salespeople are drilled on what to do and say in front of a customer without having a firm understanding of the sales cycle and the fundamental characteristics of the sales opportunity itself. This is why so many salespeople have trouble with forecasting—they don’t understand how to recognize the value of the sale, and what factors determine it. This ignorance is compounded by misunderstanding the underlying dynamics of the customer’s buying process, which means that it becomes impossible to make worthwhile predictions on when the sale will conclude. Faced with this, Managers have a tough time in predicting future revenues, which in lean economic times can have an adverse effect on the health of the business.

Newton’s third law says that “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Even though I did physics for over nine years of my life, I’m very rusty on that stuff. But when I started putting together the material for sales automation done right I realized that even though he didn’t know it at the time, Newton was onto something important concerning the sales cycle.

Over ten years ago I was trying to answer the question “what are the dynamics of the sales cycle—what variables change as the sales opportunity progresses through the period of time we call the sales cycle.” This was important to get to grips with because we were trying to find a way for a computer to understand those dynamics with some helpful information from the salesperson. To cut a long story short, and not to take away the punch from future postings, we developed a model that said that the sales cycle can be divided into three phases, and each phase was distinctly different, requiring special skills from the salesperson.

After we came up with this idea, I revisited Neil Rackham’s books on selling and his research on how people buy stuff, from jet planes, to computers, to houses – in fact, to anything. He found that the buying process almost always followed a three stage (phase) model. We had concluded that selling followed a three phase approach too. That’s where Newton comes in – selling is a reaction to the action of buying.

Now, I figure that if I had started off with Rackham’s ideas, coupled with a knowledge of the Third Law, I could have written SADR in half the time.