Your Deal Great Filter

salespodder -

Like most people I know, fascination gripped me about Nasa’s Cassini probe findings from Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.

“we have made the first calorie count in an alien ocean … it’s about 300 pizzas an hour … it would be like a candy store for microbes”

The conditions for Life, maybe, could exist in a hydrothermally heated, warm, ice-encrusted ocean a mere 800m miles away. Has the “second genesis” event we crave occurred, and so relatively close to home?

I was instantly reminded of when a remarkably bright, inquisitive chap shared with me once that he fervently believes we live in a Cosmic Zoo.

The Zoo Hypothesis states aliens exist, know we’re here, but leave us alone. Watching on as we pale-blue-dot-dwellers solve problems.

For this to hold true, there must be some creatures, somewhere else, that have already overcome all manner of sticky obstacles. From forming Life at all through to a leap from one significant state to another along a road to interstellar travel. At many a point, an exceptional barrier to progress must be overcome.

The Great Filter idea suggests such development needs nine steps to get from a suitable planet to an interstellar civilization;

1. The right star system (including organics)
2. Reproductive something (e.g. RNA)
3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4. Complex (archaeatic & eukaryotic) single-cell life
5. Sexual reproduction
6. Multi-cell life
7. Tool-using animals with big brains
8. Where we are now on Earth
9. Colonization explosion

Current thought suggests at least one of these filters is extremely improbable. From our viewpoint that’ll be the ninth. Just because we’ve accomplished the preceding eight though does not mean any of them are more than a once-in-a-universe event. Perhaps the Great Filter is No.9. Or maybe it’s an earlier one.

My Sales mind jumped onto selling which builds on the Drake Equation process.

Every deal will have its own filtering steps too.

Do you know what they are? In which order they present? And any Great Filter beyond each deal must crucially and uniquely pass before coming home?

Here’s one such potential selling equivalent I quickly thought of, using the time-honoured lens of “need”.

  1. need exists
  2. need acknowledged
  3. need core to personal ambitions
  4. need core to organisational desires
  5. need gains resource allocation
  6. need given urgent priority
  7. need actioned
  8. need delivered
  9. need sated

You can’t help but think of the famous conversation giving rise to The Fermi Paradox. In short, if there are aliens … why haven’t we met them?

In a sales sphere, this may well sound like;

where is every deal?

…they are among us and call themselves ‘not looking at the moment’