Marketing and Sales is Like Volleyball, not Gymnastics

By  Hank Barnes

My daughter is very talented (I have to admit).  After graduating from NC State this year with a 4.0 average, she is heading to UNC Med School.  Additionally, she was an all-star cheerleader for many years and also did gymnastics. A few years ago, she wanted to learn to play volleyball (my sport).   While she picked it up the basics quickly, she struggled with some aspects of the game.

The basis for any sport is getting the fundamentals.  Once you understand those, you work to improve your ability to execute those. The process is pretty straightforward. However, once you get past that,  the path to excellence changes, based on the sport.  

In gymnastics and cheerleading (and many other individual sports), your routine is defined. Success is totally based on executing better than the competition. You work and work to master the fundamentals and more challenging elements. In volleyball (and most team sports), it is all about reacting to what is happening around you. 

My daughter could execute the fundamentals (bump, serve, set, etc.)  pretty well. But her biggest challenge, athletically, was reacting to  the flow of the game. We taught her positioning, but her years of structured routines made her mind think that her “spot” on the court was fixed versus a general area that she needed to cover, moving around based on what was happening in the game. You have to learn the fundamentals (and improve them over time), but you don’t succeed until you understand how to adapt to the flow of the game–and find ways to  change it in your favor.

This is a lot like marketing and sales.  While the fundamentals are  well understood and, relatively easy to learn; that is not enough. You could master all of the fundamentals, but if you don’t react to the  flow of the customer buying process, you fail.  If you let them control  the flow in a way that highlights your weaknesses, you lose. 

Our Go to Market team often gets asked questions about the best marketing tactic or sales approach, and the reality is that the answer  “it depends” is accurate (though not very helpful). To add value, we  need to dig deeper with the client to understand the environment, the competition, and the customer.  All of these factors, and more, need to be considered.  What worked once may not work as well again, because others are reacting as well.

To be successful, you need to understand what is going on around you  and adapt your approaches on an ongoing basis. Think like a volleyball player (or football, hockey, basketball, tennis, etc.).    Learn the fundamentals, but from there spend as much time as you can understanding the factors that change the flow of the situation and exploring ways to leverage those factors or re-orient them in your favor. 

While “routines” (e.g. sales process, telemarketing scripts) provide guidance and structure, you have to adjust on the fly to be a winning marketer or salesperson.