Leaving the Field

by Graham Denton

Some years back a New York radio psychologist, Harvey Rubin, wrote a mundanely titled but interesting book called Competing. In it he distinguished between "face sports" and "side sports." In a face sport, you compete head to head with an opponent, trying to block him directly from doing something just as he is trying to block you. Boxing is the clearest example, but less obviously confrontation sports also qualify. Football, baseball, hockey, soccer, basketball, tennis - all are examples of what Rubin called face sports.

Side sports, Rubin wrote, are activities in which victory comes to the person who does something better than, but not directly against, his or her opponent. Examples would be the track and field events, swimming, skiing, shooting, and golf.

Since sports are so central to modern life, and since the fitness craze has pulled more and more of us onto the playing field, it's not surprising that, when we think of business competition, we often resort to using sports analogies. Unconsciously but tellingly, we think of ourselves as face competitors ("We really gave them a beating this past quarter") or as side competitors ("We're pulling ahead of them") or both. There's nothing wrong with that in itself. In fact, sports metaphors serve a useful function, in helping to keep us hungry and on our toes. However, there's no exact analogy between selling and either face or side sports. Here's why.

In all these physical sports, the competitors are out on the field, duking it out between themselves, while the spectators sit in the stands, cheering them on. There's a well-defined border between players and watchers, and crossing that border - as when a player jumps into the stands to pummel a heckler - will get you expelled from any stadium not run by Neanderthals. Exactly the opposite is the case in a selling competition.

Think of yourself and your biggest competitor as the players on the field, and think of the customers whose attention you're wooing as the spectators. In this scenario, whether you think of yourself as a face or a side competitor, if you stay on your side of the border, you will lose. Winning at sales, unlike winning at a physical sport, depends on constantly "jumping the border" to sit in the stands. Why? Because that's where the real game is.

Selling is a game not of "showing off" for the spectators, but of interacting with them. Selling is the only "sport" of which this is true. It's the only one in which the real work, and the real awarding of prizes, goes on off the field. Or, to put it a little more precisely, it's the only game in which the "field" and the "stands" are identical, because the true work of selling is not "beating" your competitors but interacting with the "fans."

When it's done right - I mean by real professionals - selling is a form of highly sophisticated conversation. As such, it has much more to do with education than it does with scoring touchdowns. That being so, maybe it's time to reconsider those ancient sports metaphors. Maybe it's time to see that, for all the "fire in the belly" intensity that sports-mindedness instills, there's a down side to thinking of what we do as a form of butt-kicking. Because if you're spending all that time fighting the other guy, who's talking to your customers?