Closed vs Open Systems - Why Identify is the first step to understanding systems.
We always start our sales cycles in the "identify" stage, because we need to map out the status, variables, and permeable boundaries of each account: undertanding the system.
If you're a seller, you've probzbly heard tons of conflicting advice in sales. "Every interaction matters" vs "Pipeline cures all" "Sales is a numbers game" vs "build focus and a high win rate"
In reality, the reason you hear these mixed messages, is because they're both true at their own scale.
Systems can be defined as:
open - constantly changing, infinite variables and inputs
closed - hard boundaries, finite inputs and variables, fully calculable.
And this dichotomy - either open or closed - is fictious. In reality, systems are typically somewhere in between. Certainly, sales is.
As a semi-closed system, sales environments have individual deals where on any given day/week the system is closed along with years, careers, and trends, where variables like demand or buying committees or volume change over time.
Sales existing in "both" types of systems at once is part of why we have this discordant advice everywhere.
Some sellers are much better at managing open systems. Some are better at learning and winning in closed systems.
But seeing it solely as either is missing the boat entirely.
Ultimately, sellers sell to moments in time, "closed" systems with permeable borders. As these moments change (think timing, compelling events, budget, new stakeholders), time basically represents the passage of variables inside and outside of the borders.
But regardless of whether we consider it closed or open, looking at sales with "systems theory" helps us understand why so many successful sellers can be giving so much contradictory advice.
This is why Leibig's law of minimums makes so much sense when applied to selling.
Applied to growing plants and agriculture, Leibig's law states: "Growth is restricted not by the total resources available, but by the scarcest limiting factor."
This is why you can have an amazing deal outside of one factor, and that factor prevents you from getting the sale. In that case, your "plant" is missing a key ingredient like sunlight - it doesn't matter how much fertilizer or water you give it, it's not going to excel.
So Leibig's law of minimums helps us understand the minimum requirements for successful selling and analyze individual deals on where they might be stuck: do you have a compelling event, do you have a champion, can we justify budget, etc.
However, another theory of systems which might help you better understand the world of selling is Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. Popularized in the business novel "The Goal", the Theory of Constraints is similar to Leibig's law of minimums, but is more recent and relevant for business. It states:
"Every system has a limiting factor or constraint. Focusing improvement efforts to better utilize this constraint is normally the fastest and most effective way to improve profitability."
While we always have at least one constraint on our throughput (sales production), there can be multiple. Our job in the identify stage is then to determine which constraint is responsible, work through P4 (pain, problem, people, priority) to create a problem statement, and then build a vision for what happens when that problem statement is resolved and throughput increased.
The difference between Leibig and Goldratt is subtle but it matters. Leibig is static - it tells you what's missing right now. Goldratt is dynamic - it tells you that the moment you fix one constraint, a new one emerges, and the work of identifying never really stops.
Both apply to selling, just at different layers.
Inside an individual deal, Leibig is the right lens. You're scanning a checklist: compelling event, champion, economic buyer, quantified implication, budget, timeline. If one is missing, the deal isn't going to grow no matter how much you push on the others. You can have the cleanest Gap Analysis in the world, but if there's no compelling event, the plant doesn't get sun. It dies on the vine.
Across your pipeline and your year, Goldratt is the right lens. You're managing throughput. Where are deals actually stalling? Is it discovery quality? Champion development? Stakeholder mapping? Deal structure? Whatever stage is bottlenecking the most deals is where your improvement effort should go - not everywhere at once, not on the stuff that's already working. Fix the constraint, and a new one will appear. That's not a failure. That's the system telling you it's ready for the next level of work.
This is why "identify" is the first step.
You can't fix what you haven't named. You can't break a constraint you can't see. And you can't tell whether a deal is missing a Leibig minimum or whether your whole territory is bottlenecked at a Goldratt constraint until you've actually mapped the system.
Most sellers skip this. They jump straight to influence - pitching, demoing, sending proposals - without ever doing the diagnostic work of figuring out which variables are inside the boundary, which ones are crossing it, and which one is actually limiting growth.
That's why so much sales advice contradicts itself. The sellers giving that advice are operating at different layers of the system without realizing it. The activity-metrics crowd is optimizing for the open-system, year-over-year view. The deep-discovery crowd is optimizing for the closed-system, deal-by-deal view. Both are right at their own scale. Both are wrong if applied to the wrong scale.
Identify is how you figure out which scale you're operating at, what's actually limiting growth, and where to focus.
Everything that comes after - influence, implement, iterate - depends on that diagnostic being right.
If you get identify wrong, you'll spend the rest of the cycle pouring water on a plant that needs sun.
Stay tuned as we discuss more about Change-Based Selling!
