A few days ago, I called my uncle who recently underwent knee surgery. Thankfully, he had good news to share. His pain had begun to subside and he was now able to move around. We prayed and laughed together, celebrating his progress.
During our conversation, my uncle shared an Igbo proverb:
Kedu ka i mere ga-agwo oria ma gi jiri obi oma juo ya.
Or in English – asking someone how they are doing can heal their sickness when you ask with a pure heart.
While sales was hardly the focus of our time together, the proverb struck a chord with me. The first half of the idiom is quite intuitive; it’s the second half that I found most poignant, so I’ll focus there.
“…when you ask with a pure heart.”
As sales executives, we are measured on the quantity and quality of our output. As such, we set our sights on delivering these outputs quarter after quarter – making more dials, qualifying more leads and closing more deals. The risk though of getting into this routine is that it’s all too easy to lose sight of the fundamental reason for all of this effort. At worse, our actions could become influenced by insincere motives, which inevitably leads to reduced customer trust and lost business.
With a pure heart, one can climb through layers of rejection and come out unscathed. Even when dealing with what may seem to be a difficult client, a pure heart takes a long term view and eventually earns the customer’s respect and signature. Essentially, a pure heart gets rewarded over and over. It’s also difficult to “act out” having a pure heart for an extended period. In due course, the movie comes to an abrupt end.
In my experience, asking with a pure heart means starting with the customer outcomes, not the product or the competition. If the customer doesn’t believe the intentions are genuine, then nothing else matters and your window of opportunity closes.