Top Gun and the Lost Art of Close-Quarters Selling

Technology has increasingly allowed sellers to operate at ever greater distance and scale. In doing so, we neglected the skills required to sell at close-quarters, person to person.

Until a procurement AI buys from a sales AI, and with digital channels saturated, those skills are becoming valuable again.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

Maverick, Goose, Iceman and Slider. Call signs of the leading characters in Tony Scott’s 1986 hit movie – Top Gun. Top Gun is the nickname for the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School (NFWS), established at Naval Air Station Miramar in 1969. It was established to improve air-to-air combat skills after disappointing performance in Vietnam. The Navy also described a need to shift from heavy reliance on radar toward more visually oriented tactics. In other words – more “close quarter” engagement.

Get where we’re going here? Previous aerial theaters proved the value of the close-quarters skill. In WWII there was no other way. New technology then persuaded people that those skills were becoming obsolete and unnecessary. Hence, those skills atrophied as more “stand-off” (or long distance) systems were deployed. Vietnam demonstrated that the technology hadn't eliminated the need for them after all. Topgun was created to restore them.

Something similar has happened in sales. We built technology for engaging buyers at scale. But somewhere along the way, we forgot how to engage them at close quarters.

The Industrialization of Prospecting

Maybe there wasn’t much difference between this and previous industrialization waves. As new business sellers (back in the day) we had some marketing support (generally events, sponsorships, advertising, sales collateral), but most of the activities of business development we did ourselves – cold calling, direct mail, and we even used to just walk into offices and find out who was who and what was what! 

Technologies emerged and pretty soon we’d got CRM (previously SFA), email, marketing automation, sales engagement, intent data, sequences, LinkedIn, RevOps and now AI. Every generation promised some combination of cheaper + faster + more + measurable. And broadly delivered it. So naturally sellers increasingly became operators of the prospecting machine.

We optimized the process around getting a meeting rather than getting good at the human interaction that happens before, during and after one. We want modern sellers (and marketers for that matter) to be able to “operate the tech stack.”

Then Four CIOs Said Something Interesting

I was at a tech event the other day and there was a panel featuring four CIOs from major sports brands or sports-related businesses. Someone asked, “How should people with interesting solutions get in front of you?”

All four agreed – “Come to events like this and talk to us.”

Their inboxes are clogged. LinkedIn is clogged. Automated outreach is ubiquitous. They don’t take calls from people or numbers they don’t recognize. AI will (probably) make the volume problem worse. It lowers the cost and effort involved in creating apparently personalized outreach.

The easier it became to contact someone, the harder it became to get their attention.

The Return of Close-Quarters Selling

Close-quarters selling isn't pitching someone beside the coffee machine.

It's being able to:

• approach someone you don't know;

• establish rapport without being clumsy;

• become interesting - present an insight or demonstrate some knowledge of their world

• ask questions and actually listen;

• read the other person;

• recognize whether there's something worth pursuing;

• leave with a natural reason to continue the conversation (or not)

These sound pretty basic. But we’re not developing these skills in modern sellers. We used to. I remember being sent on two-day body language courses and reading books by Edward de Bono!

Experience and “Know How” Matter

People who’ve spent time selling face-to-face have accumulated thousands of small interactions. They learned how to read a room. When to approach. When to shut up. When someone is interested versus merely polite. How to move from social conversation to business without making the transition awkward, and they did it more through trial and error.

Those “activities” aren't easily captured in a playbook. They’re hard to measure and therefore don’t fit the modern tech stack quarterbacking requirement.

Technology didn't make those skills obsolete. It simply created an environment in which we could apparently succeed without using them. As history continues its cycles of repetition, what was old becomes new again. Experience that looked old-fashioned suddenly becomes relevant.

Sales Needs Its Own Top Gun

I’m not saying you throw away the tech stack. What I am saying is you must find a balance, ( (and by the way, there is a role for technology in “close quarter selling.) Top Gun didn't teach pilots to reject technology. It restored capabilities that technology had caused the system to undervalue. Indeed, subsequent Navy air-combat performance improved dramatically.

Keep CRM. Keep intent data. Keep automation. Keep (and learn how to best use) AI. But we need to start deliberately developing close-quarters selling skills alongside them.

The next generation of great sellers won't be the ones who reject technology. They'll be the ones who can find the balance between being able to operate just as effectively when there's no screen between them and the buyer.