Selling@Zero Distance

Your Salespeople Aren’t Resisting. They’re Reporting.

The CEO had found the problem.

His salespeople were too technical. They didn’t like selling. They didn’t want to be salespeople.

So he did what any serious leader does. He added a KPI.

Visits per week. Then calls per day. Then new customers per quarter.

Each new number was meant to make them do what he expected.

None of them did.

When I asked him what his salespeople heard from customers, he didn’t know.

The room went quiet.

The gap isn’t where you think

Every leader knows the feeling. You see what needs to change. You explain it. You build the plan. And nothing moves.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton called it the knowing-doing gap. The distance between understanding what needs to change and actually changing what we do.

We like to describe the entrepreneur as the one who sees a possibility before everyone else.

Here’s the thing. The word says something more useful. Entrepreneur comes from the Latin inter and prehendere. To take hold of what lies between.

Seeing the gap is not the job. Taking hold of it is.

And most founders are brilliant at the first part.

Your judgement is the first bias

That’s precisely the trap.

Founders and CEOs are usually the first to see the problem. They have the experience, the instinct, the professional judgement. So they move straight to the diagnosis and the solution.

The faster you see, the less you look.

My CEO had his diagnosis: technical people who resist selling. Every KPI he added was built on it.

So I spent time with his salespeople. No plan to sell them. No judgement. Just to understand their reality.

Here’s what I found.

They are technical people. That’s exactly why they care deeply about the quality of what gets delivered. And they hear every customer complaint first.

In some cases, delivery wasn’t good. They knew it. The customers told them so.

They were resentful. And when they walked into a meeting with a new prospect, they didn’t feel confident promising something they had seen fail.

They weren’t resisting selling.

They were refusing to sell something they didn’t fully believe in.

From the CEO’s chair, that looks like resistance. From the field, it’s integrity.

And another KPI only adds pressure to a problem that pressure can’t solve. The conditions for them to sell with confidence simply weren’t there.

The time nobody takes

Look at where the energy goes in most companies. Diagnostics. Audits. Action plans. Solutions.

Now look at how much time leaders spend with the people who are supposed to execute that plan. Not to correct them. Not to motivate them. Just to see what they see.

Almost none.

What the people who “resist” are really doing, more often than not, is reporting. They’re reporting something the dashboard can’t show.

A warning. If you ask these to confirm what you already think, don’t bother. They’ll know within five minutes. These questions only work if you’re ready to be wrong about your own diagnosis.

Taking hold of what lies between

The gap between knowing and doing is rarely a gap in knowledge. It’s a distance between the person who decides and the people who execute. Between the plan on the slide and the reality in front of the customer.

Closing that distance is the work behind Selling@Zero Distance™. It doesn’t start with a new KPI. It starts with a chair next to the people you thought were the problem.

Resistance is often just reality that nobody has asked about.

When did you last sit with your team only to understand, and not to fix?