Never Be Closing: How to Sell Better Without Screwing Your Clients, Your Colleagues, or Yourself
Tim Hurson and Tim Dunne
Portfolio/The Penguin Group (2014)

How and why “Productive Thinking” can accelerate personal growth and professional development

In the film version of his play, Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet adds a new character, Blake (played by Alec Baldwin), who visits the Chicago office of a real estate company and challenges the under-performing sales force: “A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing. ALWAYS BE CLOSING. A-I-D-A. Attention, Interest, Decision, Action. Attention – Do I have you attention? Interest – Are you interested? I know you are, because it’s f**k or walk. You close or you hit the bricks.” The ABC approach is to say and do whatever is necessary – even if it’s illegal and/or unethical – to make the sale.

I thought of that opening scene as I began to read Never Be Closing by Tim Hurson and Tim Dunne. They suggest another approach: NBC. (Steven Yastrow recommends a similar approach in Ditch the Pitch: The Art of Improvised Persuasion. He’s convinced – and I agree – that the most effective communications are those that do not seem like a “pitch.” Rather, they seem natural, unrehearsed, straightforward, improvised, etc.) According to Hurson and Dunne, their approach — Productive Selling — “isn’t just a catalog of techniques to wrestle money out of a client’s pocket. It’ a comprehensive strategy that starts with a well-researched process for identifying and solving problems…At its essence, Productive Selling is about helping people solve problems. It focuses the power of a deliberate problem-solving process to help people. It shows you how to access your creativity to establish and maintain relationships that will be truly useful for both you and your clients over time.”

Hurson introduced the Productive Thinking Model (PTM) in his previously published book, Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking. In this final chapter, he asserts that — as practiced in much of corporate America — training “is an astonishing waste of resources” when there is no follow-through on front-end training to embed and then strengthen even more the skills taught. In fact, the word “training” has lost its meaning because it is now more commonly used to refer to information transfer rather than skill development. “Hurson prefers the word “entraining.” Why? “In chemistry, to entrain means to trap suspended particles in a solution and carry them along. This concept is an apt metaphor for skill development…Entraining results in a new and different workflow. Keeping those new skill particles suspended in your workflow requires the forging of new synaptic connections, new neural pathways.”

Hence the importance, the urgent importance, of mastering the Productive Thinking Model by completing a six-step process:

1. “What’s Going On?”: Complete a rigorous and comprehensive situation analysis.
2. “What’s Success?”: Determine the metrics by which impact will be measured while pursuing the given objective.
3. “What’s the Question?”: Peter Drucker is dead-on: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Make certain that the right question or the right problem has been identified. Drill down beyond symptoms,
4. Generate Answers: Assemble diverse points of view and brainstorm, guided and informed by the five underlying principles listed later
5. Forge the Solution: “Refine the most promising answers into robust solutions.” Re-read Drucker quote.
6. Align Resources: Formulate an action plan and timeframe, then obtain resources and allocate accordingly.

The Productive Thinking framework is based on a set of underlying principles that are ways of thinking that pervade the creative problem-solving process. Here are five, accompanied by comments of mine:

1. “Be Aware of Patterned Thinking.” Albert Einstein once suggested that the way of thinking that created the problems is not the way of thinking needed to solve them. Viewed another way, James O’Toole cautions against becoming hostage of what he characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”

2. “Separate Your Thinking.” That is, separate creative thinking from analytical thinking. Both can be immensely valuable but not simultaneously. The most productive brainstorming sessions generate lots of ideas. Each must then be evaluated. These are two mental processes that must be separated or neither will succeed.

3. “Reach for the Third Third.” That is, during an ideation session, the first third tends to generate ideas that are average, mediocre, etc. The second third is when participants begin to reach, stretch, ask “What if?” and “Why Not?” challenge assumptions and premises, and begin to generate a few promising options. Only during the third portion of the session do breakthrough ideas begin to occur. The first two portions are essential to reaching the third.

4. “Look for Unexpected Connections.” With all due respect to the importance of “connecting the dots,” only on rare occasion when beginning the process are all the dots apparent. Here’s how I explain this: Everyone can see all the dots in the box; the challenge is to locate others outside the given box (or inside other boxes) that must also be considered. Probably at least some of which should also be connected. More often than not, all of the chains in a box are incomplete. That’s a major cause of problems to be solved.

5. “The Power of the Debrief.” Hurson and Dunne provide specific tools that can be of great assistance during this critically important process of review, evaluation, confirmation or revision, and then (hopefully) commitment to appropriate action(s). Prior to major initiatives, a rigorous briefing can help to ensure its success. Similarly, an even more rigorous debriefing later will help to ensure that lessons learned will then of substantial value in months and years to come.

Throughout Never Be Closing, they provide a wealth of information, insights, and counsel that can help leaders in any organization — whatever its size and nature may be — to establish and then continuously improve Productive Thinking sales initiatives “without screwing” their clients, their colleagues, or themselves.”

The title of this commentary correctly suggests that “Productive Thinking” can accelerate personal growth and professional development. What about organizations? I am also convinced that Productive Thinking at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise will enable it to achieve and then sustain outstanding performance in a global marketplace in which competition is more ferocious each day.

There is an observation by Yogi Berra quoted in Think Better that is one of two with which I conclude this brief commentary: “In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” Here’s the other, from Thomas Edison: “Vision without execution is hallucination.” My sincere hope is that everyone who reads this book will become well-prepared to do much less “selling” and much more “achieving.”