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July 2008

The genius behind never logging into the software I was selling

When I started as a sales rep at Air2Web, being a salesperson with a fairly technical background, I immediately asked for a login into the software so I could start playing around and learning the software.  My boss told me that I would not receive, nor would I EVER receive a login into our software.

His reasoning?  If I started to go into the software, I would focus on HOW the software could do certain things and IF the software could do certain things in a certain way – rather than focusing my sales activities on finding the right customers and identifying their pain.

No Single Strategy

I’ve recently gotten into answering posted questions on LinkedIn.  Its actually quite interesting to see some of the questions that people ask – many of them able to be answered with a simple Google search, but others are very thought provoking and I generally love to see a lot of insight from different points of view. 

The format on LinkedIn could be better in order to generate better banter back and forth – something more like Disqus comments – but nonetheless, I think generally its a good thing.

Sales Lessons in a Chick-flick

This weekend, I was subjected to a horrible chick-flick.  To, be more accurate, it was a chick-documentary, but still not something that I would ever pick myself.  The documentary was “My Date With Drew.”  For those of you not familiar with this documentary, essentially its about a man who decides he is going to give himself 30 days to try to secure a single date with Drew Barrymore.

In his words, its a story about how a nobody can use networking, and six degrees of separation to get to an “untouchable” person like Drew Barrymore.  What the movie is REALLY about is how the main character will NEVER be successful in life. – or at least never be successful in sales.

Sales Self-Sabotage

Juff Thull posted a great article on Sales Self-Sabotage on Sales Pro Magazine.

The best point in the article is what he describes as the “Dangling Insult.”  He says:

Here is a typical example, you may have observed this. A salesperson introduces their solution by saying, “We save companies like yours from wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost…” It sounds innocuous on the surface. Statements like this are standard sales-speak and are often true, but they also contain dangling insults. After all, if your salespeople tell a customer that she is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars, aren’t they also suggesting that she hasn’t been doing her job very well?”

How to sell cow poop

A few weekends ago, I saw a truck come and deliver cow manure to two of my neighbors.  It started me on a thought process about packaging and how really, anything can be sold, when it is packaged correctly.

Think about cow crap.  I have no idea how large this market is, but I have to imagine it is pretty darn big.  And people sign up year after year to willingly let someone deliver a truck load of cow crap, dump it in a big pile on their driveway, and then they take this stuff in wheelbarrow loads and spread it all over their yard.

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