A few years ago, my then 15-year-old son, Caleb, was playing a game on my phone in the car while my wife and I tried to decide where to stop for dessert.
“How about Dairy Queen?” I suggested.
“What’s Dairy Queen?” Caleb asked from the back seat.
We both glanced back at him, our frustration at a “dumb teenager question” evident on our faces. We told him to stop playing and pay attention, reminding him he had been there plenty of times. He argued back that he had never been there and had never heard of it.
“The place on Highway 77,” my wife clarified, “the one that makes the Blizzards.”
“Oh, you mean DQ!” he finally blurted out.
I don’t actually know when Dairy Queen changed its name to DQ. I do know that to a 15-year-old, it has always been DQ.
TWAB! That’s The Way It’s Always Been.
People “TWAB” me all the time. When I first started working at Groupon in 2011 as a consultant, rebuilding the sales training department, I regularly encountered pushback on the changes I suggested. They would TWAB me with a, “But we’ve always done it this way!” I would think to myself, “Always? This sales department is about 2.5 years old. Since when is 2.5 years referred to as always?”
TWAB is dangerous. It’s a complacent element that fights change for the sake of fighting change. It’s a lazy and nefarious thought process. It’s the repetition of a pattern that absolves us of any duty to think things through and be responsible for our actions and results. It’s a dinosaur—the TWABosaurus Rex.
A well-established and well-thought-out sales process is a great thing. I am certainly NOT advocating for winging it in our sales efforts. Plan a strategy, test it, prove it, use it, and repeat it. However, when meteors start falling from the sky, be aware and make adjustments.
At Sales Fix, we teach a very structured elevator pitch based on neuroscience and psychology (we call it the Magic Minute). It’s a framework that is repeatable, but we constantly remind our clients that it is not a script. A script is locked in and cannot adjust. A process is malleable to the situation at hand.
If we start scripting ourselves, TWAB will show up pretty quickly and infect our brains. You will often see TWAB in sales decks, procedures, SOPs, and corporate guidelines. TWAB has killed more previously successful companies than almost anything else. TWAB killed Blockbuster when they told themselves that “people have always rented videos in person and paid late fees,” even though video rentals had only been a thing for maybe 15 years. 15 years is not a long time in the overall scope of things. It’s certainly not “always”.
TWAB can set in even quicker. Just the other day, while warming up and stretching before morning Jiu Jitsu class, a fellow student across from me was complaining because he was interviewing for a position that required him to go into the office every day. “I’ve always worked from home,” he said. He’s 23! He’s been in the workforce for less than two years, and somehow the work-from-home concept is already a TWAB for him. I have T-shirts in my closet older than him. Always shouldn’t even be in his vocabulary. I bet he’s never heard of Dairy Queen, either.
**Let’s Get Practical!**
So, how do you “unTWAB” yourself?
* Review your sales routine.
* Research the reason you do it that way.
* Confirm that the reasoning is still valid.
* If it’s not, do the “20 Exercise.”
**20 Exercise (borrowed & adapted from the great Brian Tracy)**
* Isolate the behavior (e.g., “I use a cold email as first contact”).
* Make a list of 20 different ways to do that.
* 1-5 will be easy.
* 6-15 will be more challenging.
* 16-20 will be excruciating. Push yourself. Think outside the box. Try the opposite. Steal from someone else. Ask AI.
* Likely 18 of the 20 will be silly, stupid, impractical, or useless. The other 2 will be gold. That’s normal. Gold miners move a lot of rock and dirt to find the gold.
Don’t be a TWABer!