How Teaching and Selling Are Similar yet Different
At first glance, teaching and selling may seem completely divorced from other each. But when you’re talking to a salesperson, you may learn something. For example, when I bought my fridge, the salesperson told me that all fridges are inverter-based nowadays, and work better. He taught me something.
As another example, I work as a technical advisor to CXOs. When I talk to a lead, I’m technically a salesperson, but I often end up educating them, and they can benefit from this learning.
So the concepts of teaching and selling are not completely divorced.
A friend and I made this infographic to understand this better:
First, let’s understand what teaching means. Teaching begins with a context. For example, for this video:
the context is a tech startup executing a project that has been delayed.
Then is the learning, which is the core part of teaching, shown in a big box. Finally, you get some results, but the teacher doesn’t typically focus on results, because they happen after the teaching is over.
Now let’s move on to sales.
The same three activities happen: we start with a context like “My startup is having problems A and B.” Then I might teach them how to do things differently to solve the aforementioned problems. Finally, I commit certain results, like the software being built correctly. The same three activities happen as in teaching: Context → Learning → Results.
What’s different is the relative importance of these three aspects: in sales, context is important: the customer wants you to understand their specific needs and sell something that meets those needs, as opposed to teaching Newton’s laws of motion, which are the same for everyone. In addition to context, results are important, and learning is less important — customers will learn, to some extent, to make the sale a success, but only to a limited extent.
In summary, the same three activities Context → Learning → Results happen in both teaching and selling, but with different priorities.