I learned a great deal from my mentor, Dermot Bradley — the inventor of the SCOTSMAN® qualification tool and of Commitment Based Selling. I have a lot to thank him for, and I’d like to share some of the wisdom he passed on to me.
My tutor at college was Professor Sir Eric Ash, who later became a Director of BT and then MD of the Student Loan Company. When I was leaving college, he left me with one final thought: the man who believes he cannot do something is probably right — and so is the man who believes he can.
“Remember,” he said, “as you go through life: life is the summation of small problems.” It was a cryptic statement from an electrical engineer, and I wasn’t sure I fully understood it at the time. But the phrase stuck, and I have come to respect it more and more.
Even the biggest jobs are millions of small ones
I have often noticed that even the most complex projects can be broken down into a series of simple ones, if they are properly thought through. For technical tasks the statement is almost self-evident:
Building a bridge across the River Avon is not a big job. It is millions of small jobs.
And in the sales world, when a large sale is being negotiated, the same principle applies. It is the idea of commitments that defines the building blocks for the whole project. The achievement of each objective is a sub-problem along the way to winning the whole deal. The only way to achieve the objective is to start working towards it — and planning in detail tells us what to do this week towards meeting it.
An objective without a plan is just a good intention.
Bottled common sense
During my career I was sent on many sales training courses, covering everything you could think of in sales and leadership. But what really stuck was what Dermot created and delivered. It had the most impact, and we all thought of it as bottled common sense. As one of our students once put it: “Instinct is common sense — enough of it is genius.”
Dermot had turned the concepts of sales qualification and pipeline management on their head. Combining his tools with the discipline of customer commitments doubled their power. For my team it became the most important planning tool for winning deals, and a valuable time-management tool as they learned to replicate the best. They doubled their selling time and their win rates. Dermot had seeded a simple thought: be first past the winning post, or first out of the race. For me, it made sales forecasting that much easier.
There’s a twist in the tale. When I left Xerox, I bought his intellectual property — my “Victor Kiam moment”, after the entrepreneur who liked the Remington shaver so much he bought the company.
Small problems, solved continuously
The principle is timeless: win the big deal by getting the small commitments right, one at a time. The hard part has always been tracking all those small building blocks across a whole pipeline, on every deal. That is exactly what SCOTSMAN® AI now does — breaking each opportunity down into the commitments that matter, naming the next small problem to solve, and keeping the whole campaign moving towards the win. Life, and the complex sale, really is the summation of small problems — now solved continuously.
