Non-Selling Sales, Along with The Moat

 Conventional training for both hands-on sales and creating content for sales/marketing hammers pitching your product/services benefits. That, of course, launches the competitive situation: Prospects compare your benefits with what else has been presented to them by other businesses or nonprofits.

SPACE YOU OWN

In contrast, caring about the weak links in your prospects’ systems, operations, approaches, or lifestyles establishes space you own. It’s not selling. It’s setting up the unique context of partnership. It’s up to you to structure that in a way that a moat surrounds it. Competitors will have to hunt around for other kinds of weak links.

This focus on caring about weak links is the fourth in Law and More’s exclusive series on non-selling sales. The most recent has been Thinking Like a Scientist, Not Marketing/Sales Types. The first article in this Law and More series explains the non-selling sales secret of nurturing the strength of weak ties. The second focuses on The Always Be There Principle.

FROM FACEBOOK TO LINKEDIN

The founders of Facebook made clear to the eventual users at Harvard that there was a weak link in their ability to connect with each other via their .edu email address and photos. That limited their social networking. The potential members connected the dots. It wasn’t selling. It was a pull force. Soon enough, entrepreneurs, known for spotting weak links, created other types of social networks. Facebook, though, didn’t seem to be good at moat-building.

LinkedIn, as an early professional network, picked up on the weak links between those needing talent and the talent. There were also those weak links in how professionals could connect digitally with each other. Over the years LinkedIn, through its Updates, recognized the weak links between communicating about work and about personal life. Some contend LinkedIn has evolved into a personal network for professionals. Being on Linkedin is a must for most professionals. In itself that has created the moat.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

From its founding in 1935, self-help recovery organization Alcoholics Anonymous focused on the weak links in the thinking and behavior of problem drinkers. It introduced those in its “bible” the Big Book. Those insights were codified in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. That approach created a disconnect between the usual excuses for alcohol abuse such as the awful boss or an abusive childhood to doing an inventory of one’s inner life and personal conduct.

No surprise, this twelve-step program is based on attraction, not promotion. There is no soliciting of new members. What attracts is the transformation of former problem drinkers to responsible human beings who have addressed those weak links.

 As is well known, the court system compassionately recognizes the existence of weak links. It provides as an alternate to jail attendance at AA meetings to experience a paradigm shift: repairing those links. AA labels that weak links “character defects.”

PAUL WEISS’ ESG ADVISORY PRACTICE

Chairperson of law firm Paul Weiss Brad Karp noticed this: the weak links between the operation of business as usual and what the front lines of the ESG (Environmental Social Governance) movement were demanding in terms of values and conduct. Corporate leaders were reeling. They, as the upheaval at Disney and Starbucks showcase, still are. In spring 2020, Karp formally created the legal sector’s first Sustainability & ESG Advisory Practice. Its moat is its multi-disciplinary expertise, including Wall Street transactional and litigation experience.

In a Corporate Counsel article, targeted at the in-house legal department market segment, Karp, along with Paul Weiss’ Chief Sustainability Office David Curran, explicitly use the term “weak link.” They discuss:

“… ESG links in mergers and acquisitions and IPOs. When it comes to reputational risk, clues are often buried in places that lawyers don’t traditionally look. All it takes is one weak link – in a supply-chain agreement or a board member’s bad behavior …”

CARING

So, how can established businesses, startups, and nonprofits identify weak links? There has to be caring. Not a one-dimensional focus on profit-making or achieving a mission if a non-profit. But that has nothing to do with emotion per se. It has everything to do with a determination to discover why a problem continues to exist. After connecting the dots on the weak link, then there can be a solution. The market is usually positioned to magically embrace it.

Connect with Editor-in-Chief Jane Genova at janegenova374@gmail.com. Now and then she covers social networks and Alcoholics Anonymous and does freelance communications projects for law firms such as Paul Weiss.

 

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