Sales Performance Lessons from Chess: Helping Prospects Win

What if the key to better sales performance was letting your prospect win? Discover a strategy that turns sales into a win-win game.


If you feel like you are playing chess when selling, you might be thinking of it wrong. Chess can be an excellent analogy for sales strategy, but only one person wins.  What if we thought about the game and the objective differently?

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My name is Brian Kavicky, and I'm a sales expert. The game of chess has been around for over sixteen hundred years.

It is a strategic game often used as an analogy for war, strategy, and business.

I think it is a perfect analogy for many aspects of sales, especially when we add a little twist to our thinking.

Chess is won by checkmating or boxing in the king so that it cannot move without being taken.

To be good at chess, you must think five to six moves ahead. A grand master can think ten to fifteen moves ahead.

Sales also involves thinking ahead, being strategic, and proactively getting in front of problems to prevent them before they occur. Different strategies and moves help you advance the conversation and eventually win the deal. When you are skillful in strategy and understand the moves and their effects, you can succeed in sales.

However, with how it is traditionally played, chess is a terrible analogy for sales. Winning at chess means trapping your opponent to win. Sales, when done well, will never trap your prospect.

What if we changed our thinking about how to win? What if a true victory was letting your opponent win? What if we used the same pieces, the same board, the same moves, but the strategy changed so that we would play to let the opponent win? What if, at the end of the game of chess, you were happy because your strategy worked and your opponent was delighted because they had won?

Sales is the same thing as playing chess with those rules. Our prospects should feel like they are in control of the sales process.

They should be able to make decisions freely in their best interest.

We should be assisting and helping them achieve their goals and objectives versus thinking about how we win.

We need to with a solution they love.

Brian Kavicky

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For 25 years, Lushin has guided business leaders toward intentional, predictable growth.

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For 25 years, Lushin has guided business leaders toward intentional, predictable growth.