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.