A woman walking down the street comes to a construction site. As she’s walking along, she sees a man hard at work laying brick and asks, “What are you doing?”

The man turns to her and says, “Well, isn’t it obvious? I’m laying brick.”

She continues along and comes to another worker doing the same thing. For some reason, she asks the same question, “What are you doing?”

The worker says, “I’m building a wall.”

Shortly after she sees a third worker doing the same thing. As we’re guessing is no surprise to you, she asks the worker, “What are you doing?”

The construction worker turns to her and says, “I’m building a cathedral.”

We at RAIN Group spend most of our time teaching people how to sell. In one recent workshop, we gave an overview of the connect, convince, and collaborate framework on which Insight Selling is based. After covering it in broad strokes, we stopped for questions and comments. The first question was from someone new to selling. He asked, “Isn’t this going to take a while to get good at?”

Correct.

Even if you have the attributes to be great one day, you can’t expect greatness to come overnight with the guitar, neurosurgery, or karate. Selling is no different. Whether you’re looking personally to reach your potential or trying to raise the bar on sales performance at your organization, you have to build the insight selling cathedral the long way: brick by brick.

Sure, there are books akin to Guitar Made Simple, Karate Made Simple, and several along the lines of Selling Made Simple (we hope to never see Neurosurgery Made Simple, though you never know), but if you’re serious about any of these pursuits, it takes focus, effort, and time. Sometimes it’ll feel like it’s a lot for naught: waking up early, laying brick all day, and going to sleep late at night only to wake up and do it over again. (People who have had to do their own prospecting and build their own business know this feeling.)

But it’s worth it. Products and services may be increasingly interchangeable, but people never will be. If tips and tricks to close the sale are your game, you probably didn’t like this book very much. If, however, winning sales consistently and creating sustainable competitive advantage based on value is what you’re up to, Insight Selling was probably right up your alley.

We wrote this book to be a blueprint for what sellers should do to not only sell the value of their offerings but also to become a fundamental component of value itself. We hope you’ve found it to be (dare we say) insightful and useful. The real test, of course, rests with you. Only you can train, study, practice, push yourself out of your comfort zone, and do everything else you need to do to lay all the brick. Keep at it, however, and one day you will look up, and there it will be: the cathedral you built, on a foundation built to last.