What if buyer-centricity is a skill issue?

When I work with sellers, I always make my first priority changing the lens from which they work. No one wants to buy from self-centered sellers (and buyers are successful at not buying from them at a truly astounding rate).

Buyer-centricity equips a seller with the foresight and dexterity to drive buyer success and close a lot more revenue. “Pitching” a seller on becoming buyer-centric is easy. Effecting buyer-centricity is hard.

The gap between “want-to” and actualization is so significant that our good friends at Gartner investigated and found that 87% of sellers consider themselves trusted advisors. Buyers say 14% of sellers are trusted advisors. Yikes.

If the gap is big, the implications are even bigger. 88% of buyers say they will only buy from a trusted advisor. That means 86% of sellers are missing out on 88% of the market.

This is a huge problem.

Self-centeredness is born out of necessity. Long before we know anything about the world around us, we are acutely aware of our own wants and needs. This is important to our survival, but a significant hindrance to our ability to be in a relationship that isn’t entirely focused around us.

We emulate this same development whenever we take on a new skill. When someone genuinely wants to change their lens but can’t, the problem is that they haven’t achieved a level of mastery that will enable them to graduate into others-centeredness.

When I first started to play guitar, I was incredibly self-conscious. My mind was flooded with thinking about how to hold the pick, how to form the next chord, and how to get my tone to come through. I couldn’t think about the song or the other musicians at all. This is the self-centered stage. If I never improve at the instrument, I should stay self-centered in a musical context.

There’s an odd benefit to self-centeredness: when we’re constantly thinking about what others think of us… we’re spending a lot of time thinking about what others are thinking. This kind of backward empathy and vulnerability is what I believe accounts for what we call “beginner’s luck.”

Most of us work really hard to build our skills and get out of being self-centered. If anything, just being around our new skill long enough keeps us searching for answers at how to be better. This leads to a lot of message-centeredness. Unfortunately, this is where most journeys end.

In the guitar example, this is learning how to play the intro to Sweet Child of Mine. We try to gain excellence by mimicking excellence. There’s a constant movement toward getting better and better at delivering the central message. Mastering our message feels like improvement, but it often leads to worse results as it makes us less and less flexible. We become experts on the “right” way to do things while forgetting that the purpose of music is the listener. We will be totally incapable of “jamming” with others.

Message-centricity is dangerous. It’s a necessary stage to find others-centeredness, but it will alienate us from our buyers if that’s where we stop.

If you ask musicians about the hardest discipline they had to learn, almost all will tell you that it’s ear training.

This is true for sellers as well. The leap from messaging to hearing is the most difficult and impactful skill you’ll ever develop. There is nothing that will ever mean more than becoming totally fluent in your buyer’s language. This is when you create great music together.

Learning to co-create with others is the highest form of mastery, and, ultimately, it’s what separates the best in the industry from everyone else.

Buyer-centricity means developing the skills to be capable of real empathy, and it’s the beginning of the rest of your life as a seller.