A speaker is introduced to a roomful of people who have never seen him or heard him before. He begins his presentation by reaching into his pocket, holds up a twenty-dollar bill, and says, “This twenty is for sale for exactly one dollar. Who wants to buy it?”
Now, be honest. Would you leap to your feet clamoring to get his attention? Or would you wait a few seconds, see what everyone else does, and then after a hand or two goes up, timidly raise your own?
If you’re one of the hesitators, you’re normal. We’ve been taught all our lives that only suckers fall for deals like that. But once someone else is willing to take a chance, on no better information than ours, then our greedy little hands pop up, and we tend to go along. The faster others’ hands are raised, the greater the demand, and the more likely we are to be part of it. Our sense of what something is worth derives not from the intrinsic value of the object itself—whether it’s twenties for a dollar or unusual tulip bulbs or a rare gem—but from the demand that has been created for that object.
Okay, you say, that’s Marketing 101. Everyone knows that, but what does it have to do with the real world?
A great deal, it turns out.
I’d like to tell you a story about four of the richest men in North America who absolutely did not understand this very simple concept.
Maybe we can learn something from it.
The scene: the suburbs. The most valuable property in the state (and possibly in the country), fifty acres of prime suburban real estate, becomes available for development when we tear down our old sports stadium and build a new one downtown. Enter: four brothers named Ghermezian—four men from Edmonton, Canada, by way of Iran who became rich first as rug merchants and then as real-estate developers. Their greatest achievement to date is the West Edmonton Mall, the world’s largest. The Mall of America is hardly your “run-of-the-mall” mall either: The Ghermezian gimmick involves not only sheer size (hundreds of shops, services, restaurants, etc.) but also a complete entertainment complex, 2½-acre indoor lake, twenty-five-ride amusement park, and the lavish $50 million Fantasyland Hotel. The Ghermezians call this mall “the Eighth Wonder of the World,” and hundreds of thousands of tourists agree with them. The Mall of America is today said to attract more visitors each year than the Grand Canyon, Graceland, and Disneyland combined.
The Ghermezian brothers make a terrific offer. They want to build on the old stadium site a $1.5 billion development that will provide forty thousand new, nonsmokestack jobs at union wages, utilize a vacant piece of land that’s not generating a nickel’s worth of jobs or taxes, and attract millions of visitors to the state every year.
The governor is delighted with their idea and is ready to call a special session of the legislature to pass the tax-highway-improvement-etc. package that will give the Ghermezian proposal a green light.
It sounds like exactly the sort of project every state in the country is dying for. (In fact, a few months before the Ghermezians came on the scene, the state legislature fell over backward and did everything in its power in an unsuccessful bid to attract a new General Motors Saturn automobile plant to the state—a much less attractive facility than the four real-estate moguls were proposing.) There are no catches to the Ghermezian proposal. Their requests for legislative assistance and tax relief are fairly reasonable, they have solid financial backing, and they have a reputation for doing exactly what they propose to do.
Yet in about as much time as it takes to say “the Amazing Ghermezians,” door after door is slammed in their faces, and the governor quickly backpedals and withdraws his support. It is all the result of a simple mistake in the public-relations approach to the deal: In order to supply something, you must first create a demand.
I could stand on a street corner all day long with twenty-dollar bills for sale at a dollar apiece and only manage to get arrested. Who would believe that anyone would make such a fabulous offer? There must be a catch. If the Ghermezians had done what General Motors did a few months earlier—announce that they would build their facility in the location that offered them the best deal—instead of offering us such a good deal—we would have fallen all over ourselves to attract them. We wouldn’t have to be told why their proposal was attractive. We could tell ourselves because others were competing for it. It’s the same old lesson Huck Finn taught Tom Sawyer a hundred years ago. But maybe the tale of the painting of the white picket fence wasn’t included in the Ghermezians’ childhood bedtime storybook.
Marketing is not the art of selling. It’s not the simple business of convincing someone to buy. It is the art of creating conditions by which the buyer convinces himself. And nothing is more convincing than hard evidence that others want the same thing.
The Japanese have a very simple way of describing the typical American marketing plan: READY? FIRE! AIM.
Apparently that was also the Ghermezian approach. They could have asked themselves a few simple questions: What is it I am selling? How do I create a demand for it? Who am I selling it to and what do they really want? Instead they simply plunged in and began pitching. Let’s see what the end result may have been had the Ghermezians done it differently.
Were they selling a mall? No. Jobs and tax revenues? Partly. Bragging rights to something someone else wants? Mostly.
This kind of selling, where the customer must qualify to get the product, is the salesman’s dream. And it’s the only way you can sell products that have limited intrinsic value but great snob appeal.
You think I’m talking about overpriced imported cars and jewelry? Not really. Those have pretty small price tags when you compare them with some of the really expensive toys, like real-estate developments and major-league franchises. There is no purely economic justification for the huge expenditures made by individuals and cities intent on capturing these crown jewels of conspicuous consumption. What value do you place on ego or uniqueness?
Which is just the kind of situation that GM set up with the Saturn plant.
If you’re the Ghermezians, how do you create the same kind of demand?
First, by staying in Edmonton, that mysterious and exotic home of high finance and intrigue, rather than showing up on the first plane. General Motors officials did not travel around the country to sell their proposition. They made announcements from Detroit and stood back while their customers came to them. GM understood the necessity of creating a climate where the customers became their own salesmen, and GM became a kind of referee deciding who would be awarded the sale. (It’s too bad General Motors never learned to make or sell the Saturn car better than they sold the Saturn plant. According to the Detroit News in 2004, “Saturn represented about 6 percent of the GM vehicles sold in the United States, and it has made money in only one of the last 13 years.”)
Now, why didn’t four shrewd businessmen like the Ghermezians see that when they decided to make their move? Why did they simply blunder onstage waving their twenty-dollar bills in front of a skeptical audience?
For one thing, they thought that if they had the support of the governor, that would be enough.
Wrong.
They forgot to ask two additional questions: Who are my real customers? What is it they really want?
They got part of the answer right: The politicians were their ultimate customers. The politicians are the ones who will approve the financing and incentive packages that make such deals work. Once that approval is gained, everything else is simply mechanical: how much to charge per square foot, how many advertising dollars are needed to lure the necessary customers, and so on. But to get to the politicians, you must understand how to motivate them. In their eagerness to get the decision-makers to cast the votes, sign the papers, and smile for the cameras so the business of developing the project could proceed, the Ghermezians lost sight of their customers’ real needs. The Ghermezians’ customers, the politicians, had customers of their own. The politicians began to get concerned. Were they giving their customers, the voters, something they really wanted, something that would make them vote right again at the next election? Here’s where the next part of the billion-dollar blunder was made.
Take politicians, for example. A politician will support your proposition only as long as it is politically popular or uncommonly rewarding.
That isn’t to say that pols are any less honest or reliable than the rest of us. It’s just that politicians must shift positions constantly to keep up with the people they are supposed to be leading. Legislators, particularly in faraway places such as Washington, tend to be a little less reliable than governors, who are under closer local scrutiny, but the same principle holds. It is the duty of someone who wants something from a politician either to (a) create the public climate that makes supporting that position attractive, or (b) do whatever is necessary so that a politico will return a favor from time to time—like fundraising or even organizational work.
Before you choose one tactic or the other, you had better be certain with whom you are dealing. In this case, the governor was the type of politician who thought he had something his constituents would truly want. The Ghermezians and the governor both went public together, and when it became rapidly apparent that the brothers had not created the proper climate of public opinion, the governor backed off.
To the Ghermezians’ credit, they finally got the message, hired local lobbyists, and put the pieces back together. After having asked for several hundred million dollars at the legislature and getting completely skunked, they got help at the municipal level. The current scaled-down version—call it a mini mega-mall—could have been even bigger. In fact, the Ghermezians created the 5.3-million-square-foot West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, the largest shopping center in the world, starting in 1981.
Identifying the customer does not mean that you make your pitch directly to that customer. Selling the governor in this case was easy…too easy. What the Ghermezians should have done was first build a support structure of “influencers” around that governor—the press, the unions, popular opinion, his own party, and so on—before pitching the main man. That involves a professional PR effort: stories extolling their already successful mall; leaks about competing cities plotting to sweep the Ghermezians into their fold; orchestrated demand for the product from leading opinion-makers. None of this groundwork was laid. Unfortunately (for the Brothers Ghermezian), once the governor discovered he had no crew, it was time to abandon ship.
At Mackay Envelope Company, you wouldn’t believe how much we know about our customers. The IRS wouldn’t believe how much we know about our customers. All our salespeople on our staff fill out a 66-question profile of each one of their customers. We’re not talking about the customer’s taste in envelopes, either. We want to know, based on observation and routine conversation, what our customer is like as a human being, what he feels strongly about, what he’s most proud of having achieved, and what the status symbols are in his office.
When you know your customers, some of their special interests or characteristics, you always have a basis for contacting and talking to them. I have a customer who’s a devoted Chicago Cubs baseball fan. The Cubs’ failure to make it to the top continues. That’s usually good for at least half a dozen condolence messages a year. I don’t sit there scribbling notes about the latest fashions in envelopes. I write about the Cubs; he writes about the envelopes.
I have another customer who’s a stamp collector. No matter where I go, all over the world, I send him unusual and exotic stamps. I think he must like that. He’s been a customer for nearly forty years, and in all that time, I’ve met him only once.
Knowing your customer means knowing what your customer really wants. Maybe it is your product, but maybe there’s something else, too: recognition, respect, reliability, concern, service, a feeling of self-importance, friendship, help—things all of us care more about as human beings than we care about malls or envelopes.
It’s critical to know about your customer. We’ve seen the folly of not having that knowledge. If businesspeople as sophisticated and resource-deep as the Ghermezians can make that mistake, so can we. Armed with the right knowledge, we can outsell, outmanage, outmotivate, and outnegotiate our competitors. Am I over-promising?
Not if you believe, as I do, in the value of information.
All of us gather data about other people—especially people we want to influence. The only question is how well we understand it and what we do with it.
For anyone who feels that this kind of reconnaissance smacks of Big Brotherism, remember the truth about buyers: They come prewired to regard your proposition with suspicion and cynicism. That’s their job.
It’s your job as a salesperson to neutralize these feelings so your product can get the fair hearing it deserves.
If selling were just a matter of determining who’s got the low bid, then the world wouldn’t need salespeople. It could all be done on computers. The “Mackay 66” is designed to convert you from an adversary to a colleague of the people you’re dealing with and to help you make sales.
People, not specs, will always be the key in determining who gets the sale. As Lee Iacocca said, “Anyone who doesn’t get along with people doesn’t belong in this business, because that’s all we’ve got around here.”
That’s exactly why I developed the 66-question customer profile. Yes, what we’re talking about here is filling out a form. It does not come as news to me that people don’t like to fill out forms, or that salespeople are worse than most that way. Salespeople are Big Picture types, refugees from mathematics, operating strictly from the right/creative side of the brain. I understand that. I accept that. This form is designed with those attitudes in mind.
Collecting this information is easier than you might think. Take the last page, the most important part of the Mackay 66. Customers are remarkably willing to share their management’s goals and issues with you. But, salespeople being salespeople, you often just ignore it. The standard attitude is that any piece of paper that isn’t a signed order isn’t worth reading. I’ve seen that indifference in the glazed stare of a thousand salespeople, but awareness of the information in the 66—and knowing how to use it—are what distinguish the pros from the Willy Lomans.
So don’t be turned off because I’m offering you a form. It isn’t that tough to use. You’re probably doing a lot of it already, and the Mackay 66 will just help you systematize your information in a way that will make it more useful and accessible.
Though most of the information will come from personal contact with your customer and from observation, you don’t have to be the sole collector. Your resources are:
|
Customers |
Internet data base |
|
Suppliers |
—General Press |
|
Banks |
—Financial Press |
|
Internal data base |
—Trade Press |
|
Colleagues |
—Trade Association |
|
Conventional media |
—Special Reports |
|
|
Assistants |
|
|
Receptionists |
And this is the short list.
In our shop, each of us scans the local papers, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times daily. Anything that relates to our top twenty customers is a Must Read for anyone concerned with the account.
The value of the 66 isn’t limited to salespeople. As in any business, salespeople leave. The 66 is a way to prevent their accounts from leaving with them. It gets their successor up and running with a decided timing edge, a much shorter learning curve than would be necessary if the salesperson had to start from scratch.
Because it’s all there in the internal database, the Mackay 66 also helps when salespeople and sales managers are discussing customers.
Two cautionary notes: It’s a changing world, so the 66 has to be updated continually; and, because of the kind of private information that often winds up in these questionnaires, they have to be given secure storage, with only numbered copies and no dupes floating around. For the first ten years we used this process, I would take home the files on our top ten accounts every Sunday night and drill the information into my head until I knew it by rote. Although I don’t do that anymore, once a year our marketing group and our top operating people sit down and review the material with special emphasis on the final page. This analysis of common customer issues is the launching pad for our planning process. Of course, all this data can now be burned onto a single CD-ROM. Or, it can be pulled down from the files. This is both an enormous convenience and a frightening security risk. Be darned sure that you have the safeguards in place to protect access to files like these.
Now you know how it works. The question you’re probably asking is, “Does it work?” Read the 66 now, and then let me try to answer that question.
Mackay Envelope Company 66-Question Customer Profile
Date __________________
Last updated ____________
By ____________________
Customer
Education
Family
Business Background
Company_______________________________
Location _____________________________
Dates_____________________ Title ______
Company_________________________________
Location _______________________________
Dates____________________ Title ________
Special Interests
Lifestyle
The Customer and You
Further Notes:
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
Mackay Envelope Company
Minneapolis, Minn.
Harvey Mackay
© 1988
Flip back to the 66 and look at question 5, “Birth date and place———Hometown———.” “So,” you say to yourself, “Mackay counsels sending customers a birthday card? Big deal.” Wait a minute. Sure, the customer gets a birthday card. But there’s more. Remember as kids we had an intuition never to ask for something if our folks were in a terrible mood. But when we sensed they were content, we’d hit them up for whatever the market would bear. Timing’s everything, isn’t it? At our company, we have our customers’ birthdays on computer, and they get a birthday card, of course. But guess what? That buyer also gets called on in person—and asked out to lunch—when that special day of the year rolls around.
It’s not too surprising occasionally to see our sales break the sound barrier on the same day our customer is celebrating a birthday. As for the hometown of the buyer—it’s the source of an endless supply of news clips to mail in. And you don’t even have to clip them yourself. If it’s worth it to you, subscribe to a clipping service—or pick up that hometown paper occasionally. To be armed with knowledge about Hometown, U.S.A., gives you a subject customers can talk about eight days a week.
“Education.” Questions 7–12. One day I called on a buyer who, it turned out, had graduated from the same high school I did—about fifteen years earlier. We both had the fabled Miss Malmon for English. The yarns we told were fabulous; the envelopes he bought were even more fabulous. I figured it out the other day. This buyer has purchased over 150 million envelopes from me. I wonder why.
“Family.” Questions 13–19. I luckily overheard a buyer’s secretary on the phone arranging to have her twelve-year-old daughter driven to her gymnastics event. Obviously, I asked about the daughter. Suddenly there I was, watching the Mighty Mite compete in the parallel bars event. A month later, after having brought myself up to speed in gymnastics, I mentioned it to the buyer—and got my first order the same day.
“Business background.” Question 22. “Any ‘status’ symbols in the office?” is a good question to key on. I called on a Fortune 500 company in New York—having learned that the most important reading a salesperson can do is to read the wall of his prospect’s office while waiting for him to get off the phone—and noticed a picture of the company president awarding the buyer a certificate for writing a position paper on unemployment. A week later I sent him a book on unemployment. The orders have never stopped coming.
“Lifestyle.” Questions 40–57. Tickets to the game are always a good ice-breaker, particularly if you go with the customer. And don’t take it for granted we’re just talking about men here.
I’d been calling on a purchasing agent in Chicago for three years without her ever once even asking me to quote a job.
I found out she was a wrestling fan.
Overnight I became a wrestling fan. I popped into her office, told her I had great contacts for ringside tickets to—yes, this was many years ago—Gorgeous George and would she care to go or have me make the tickets available so she could go with someone else?
It was a real struggle for her to accept. She wasn’t naïve, she knew I was trying to capture her business, but the lure of ringside seats was too much to resist. Though she decided to accept, she insisted on paying for the tickets.
Three years of hard work with no results—and to be truthful, it took another year before she even asked me to bid a job—and two more before we got an order. Six years. But it was the 66 that did it, and the business we’ve done since then made it worth the wait.
The payoff: The proof is in the envelope. Not the Mackay envelope. The pay envelope. Mackay Envelope’s salespeople earn more than double our industry’s national average. There’s just one reason: the Mackay 66.
P.S. If I had been making the same approach today, it would have been by Internet. I’d regularly be surfing the Web for hot data on pro wrestling. (There are 10.4 million entries for the word “wrestling” on the Internet.) I’d find out the latest scoop on stars like Ric Flair and Triple H and be bouncing attention-getting e-mails to the prospect off the turnbuckles!
In August 2004, I was playing in the celebrity golf tournament with the Hollywood icon Robert (RJ) Wagner. I had never met him before. Ten minutes before tee time, I got in touch with my executive assistant Greg Bailey on my cell phone from the golf course. In seconds, Greg had Googled Wagner. On the first hole, when RJ and I met, I was able to list off his movies, including his role as Number Two in Austin Powers in Goldmember. On the seventh and eighth holes, I was able to ask about his three daughters—Kate, Natasha, and Courtney. RJ was floored. The point is that the Mackay 66 is more relevant and important than ever before, but it is also much, much faster. (Not to mention less expensive!) People at the head of the class know how to press the right buttons…and those buttons are to be found on the keyboard of your computer.
Most sales manuals will tell you that the most important thing you are selling is yourself. This book won’t. In my opinion, selling yourself can sometimes be a very bad idea…because very often, my friend, you and I are lousy products.
Our challenge, whether we are salespeople or negotiators or managers or entrepreneurs, is to make others see the advantage to themselves in responding to our proposal. Understanding our subjects’ personalities is vital. Let them shine. Our own personalities are subordinate.
High profiles fit most businessmen like a cheap suit. Yes, I know Donald Trump is no shrinking violet, and he seems to be doing all right. You’re not Donald Trump and neither am I, and neither are the Ghermezian brothers. General Motors got state legislators across the country to do somersaults for their Saturn proposal, in part because the company managed to hide behind its corporate identity throughout the entire process. There were no individuals with strange-sounding names or funny accents or huge personal wealth for the press to take potshots at. Just a large, well-known, amorphous company. Who are those people? No one really knew, and they stood a better chance of getting what they wanted that way.
In the “good old days,” salesmen were matched to the ethnic makeup of their clientele. You sent your Irish salesmen out to call on Irish customers; Jewish salesmen, Jewish customers, and so on. That’s changed a bit. As some minorities have become more secure, shrewd sales managers recognize that customers who formerly were serviced along strict ethnic lines want to signal their group’s acceptance into the mainstream by dealing with people who do not reflect their own backgrounds. Okay, those people get serviced by not-whatever-the-customer-happens-to-be types. But each case is different. That’s why at my company we put a lot of thought into analyzing our customers before we decide where to place that account.
If you aren’t sure of your customers, stay home and hire someone who knows the territory. Sometimes you’ll find that your prospects are more comfortable and receptive around people whose styles are local. For instance, people from the prestige cities like New York and San Francisco tend to feel that no one knows as much about anything as they do. After all, if we had any talent that’s where we’d be living, wouldn’t we? Why should they listen to someone from Peoria? On the other hand, those of us from lesser cities often tend to be in awe of the out-of-town expert, the definition of an expert still being anyone from more than fifty miles away. In those cases you have to be prepared to dazzle by tossing the properly elegant and aloof three-piece-suiters into the mix.
There’s a correct approach for your sales situation, whether it’s hiring the right spokesperson, operating behind the corporate veil, or creating demand for your proposition. The key is knowing your customer, not just marching in and offering an objectively attractive deal.
Now that you know what can go wrong, and some of what you need to know to make it right, it’s time you learned some of the ways you can use the information you’ve won.
My definition of a salesperson is not someone who can get the order. Anyone can get the order if he tells enough lies—for example, about price or delivery time.
A great salesperson is someone who can get the order—and the reorder—from a prospect who is already doing business with someone else.
It all starts out with the sales call. I have never made a cold call in my life. Before I see anyone on a sales call for the first time, I see to it that I’m introduced. The salesperson’s classic dilemma is set out in an ad done more than a half-century ago by McGraw-Hill to promote—what else—advertising. It pictures a green-eyeshade, rolltop-desk-type curmudgeon facing the reader, who is cast in the role of the salesman. The Tough Prospect says:
If you’re selling for a big outfit, a Microsoft, your introduction is made, in part, by the company’s advertising, marketing, and public-relations program. Microsoft’s solid reputation is a powerful silent salesperson that accompanies every sales call.
If you’re not selling for a Microsoft, you need another effective entry. The best is a recommendation from one of your own customers, someone already known to your prospect.
Like most salespeople, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to build a network of customers and friends who will give me a line of communication into almost every office in my city.
There are two ways to do it: retail and wholesale. Retail means the one-at-a-time kind of contacts that are built up through participation in community or social activities. Wholesale means the recognition, and acceptance, extended by people who don’t know you personally but who have heard about you as a speaker, read your articles, or read about your civic activities in the papers.
Either method can help break down the classic barriers to a cold call.
When I don’t have a personal entry, there are other tactics I fall back on. Believe me, collecting this kind of data has become a lot easier and cheaper. I, for example, used to buy one share of stock in a company just to receive their annual report. Now you can obtain the annual report of nearly any public company online. You can collect huge amounts of data on private firms too. Start your search engine to riches. Hoover’s and Dun & Bradstreet are online with up-to-date information. Still stymied? Pick up your cell phone and phone your banker, lawyer, or accountant. (You say they aren’t supposed to disclose this kind of information? Well, if you’re talking about their clients, they aren’t, but it’s all right if they’re talking about someone else’s.) You can even check prospects out through other, noncompetitive suppliers.
Somewhere within six blocks of every company is a favored watering hole. I know of one salesperson who has developed the technique of waiting in his car across from the prospect’s parking lot on Friday afternoons for the five-o’clock whistle and then following the procession to the saloon of choice. Whatever it is he wants to know, whether it’s about a prospect or a competitor, can usually be uncorked in this convivial atmosphere. He says he has perfected the ability to lose convincingly in every bar sport in America: pool/shuffleboard/pinball/“and I’m still working on darts.”
Armed with either your annual report, your prospect’s, or both, you are now in a position to write the Tough Prospect, tell him how good your outfit is, read him back enough about his own to demonstrate you’ve done your homework and ask for an appointment.
Naturally, the whole heap ends up in the round file. You’re not done yet. You’re about to call to make an appointment to see the Tough Prospect. Your call is answered by the company receptionist. You do not ask for Mr. T.P. You say, “I’m going to ask you in a moment to connect me with Mr. T.P.’s office, but before I do, could you kindly remind me of the name of his assistant?” She will. Then ask her to connect you with Mr. T.P.’s office.
“Hello. Angela? I’m Harvey Mackay, president of Mackay Envelope Company [Straight to her brain. Who is this guy? How does he know my name? Have I met him?] I’ve written Mr. T.P. within the past two weeks, and now I’m calling him from Minneapolis. I would like to see Mr. T.P. I would like to see him for exactly three hundred seconds. I will go as far as Guam or Sri Lanka just for the purpose of seeing him for those three hundred seconds, and if I take any longer, I’ll donate five hundred dollars to T.P.’s favorite charity…which I believe is the Red Cross, isn’t it?”
When you’ve done your homework, when you’ve looked up your prospect in Who’s Who, and done some reconnaissance with his suppliers, then you know you’re right. And what an impression it makes.
The proposition is intriguing enough so that it generally works. Will this hard-charger actually get in and out in five minutes?
The truth is, I never take the full five minutes. I simply introduce myself and say, “As you may know, we’re bidding on your contract. I just came here to tell you, as president of Mackay Envelope, that we regard your business as significant. If we are fortunate enough to receive your business, I’ll take a personal interest in seeing to it that you will receive the service and crafts-manship you have every right to expect.” That’s it.
In and out in two and one half minutes. And I follow up with a presigned letter postmarked that day from Minneapolis thanking him for his time and restating the same pitch I gave him in person…and if it seems appropriate, a receipt for a check for $100 to his favorite charity. “I just wanted you to know I promised Angela I’d send a check for $500 to your favorite charity if I wasn’t out of your office in five minutes. Even though I made the deadline, I’ve always been an admirer of the Red Cross and have sent them a small donation.”
Does it always work? No. Does anything?
But it works better than anything else I’ve tried. One final wrinkle. If “Angela” won’t make the appointment for you, try to get T.P. to call back by saying, “Angela, even if he won’t see me, perhaps he will talk to me. I am going to be in my office at the following times: two P.M. to three P.M. today; eight A.M. to noon tomorrow.” And so on. Then instruct your assistant as follows: “When and if Mr. T.P. calls at any of these times, you’re to say, ‘Oh, yes, Mr. T.P., he’s been expecting your call. I’ll put you right through!’”
You don’t have to confine that device to T.P.’s. Anyone you’re playing telephone tag with will appreciate knowing when he can reach you, so leave the times as part of your message, and make sure your assistant is in on it, so she can make a fuss over the caller and call him by name (“…I’ll put you right through!”) when he does call back.
All right, you’ve done all that, you’ve talked to T.P., you’ve sent him little love notes for two years, mailed him a million boxes of apricots from The Fruit of the Month Club, and you still haven’t gotten even a whiff of an order. So what? Be patient, you will. You have positioned yourself in the best possible spot you can be in: Number Two, and a very strong Number Two, because no one, including Number One, is going to half the trouble you are to keep this account aware of your interest.
Politicians know that being a front-runner can be a very vulnerable position. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean was a shoo-in for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Weeks later, after a dismal 0–18 record in Democratic caucuses and primaries, Dean was booted out of the race by John Kerry. If the front-runner stumbles, it is Number Two who is there to pick up the votes.
You’ve got something else going for you, too. Consider for a moment the Law of Large Numbers. An entire industry, insurance, has been built on that one principle. There are 295 million living Americans. The insurance people can tell you within one-fourth of one percent just how many of us are going to die within the next twelve months—and how—and where—and in what age bracket, sex, color, and creed. That’s pretty amazing. The only thing they can’t tell us is who.
Apply the Law of Large Numbers to your prospect list. Position yourself as Number Two to every prospect on your list, and keep adding to that list. I can promise you that if your list is long enough, there are going to be Number Ones that retire or die or lose their territories for a hundred other reasons and succumb to the Law of Large Numbers. What I can’t tell you is which one. But fortunately, as in the insurance business, “which one” doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you have the perseverance and patience to position yourself as Number Two to enough different people, and the Law of Large Numbers will do for you what it has done for the insurance industry: You will be an extremely successful and wealthy salesperson. If you’re standing second in line, in enough lines, sooner or later you’re going to move up to Number One, and the amazing thing is that no one else ever uses this strategy. It works not just in business but in your personal life as well.
Country clubs and business clubs, with selective memberships and their own dining and athletic facilities, exist for one reason: to create an atmosphere that makes it easier to do business (and survive for one other: the tax laws). Let’s say you’re entertaining customers in a town where you don’t belong to a club. How do you give yourself the patina of respectability a club imparts and create that cozy, clublike atmosphere in a place where nobody knows you?
Easy.
The best way, of course, is to get someone you know in town to let you use their club and sign a tab in the member’s name. That’s a whale of an imposition, but if you have a friend willing to let you do it, do it.
If not, pick the best restaurant in town. You, not your assistant, should call beforehand, ask for the host/hostess and say you’re from out of town, you’re entertaining one of your top customers, and “You won’t be sorry when I get there.” Describe yourself and say you would like to be greeted by name. Tell him or her you want a table that has three characteristics: not near a swinging kitchen door, not near a busing station, and not in a high-traffic entrance area. Let him or her know you would like their best waiter. No menu. Just a recital of the choicest three or four items being served that day. Give the host/hostess your credit card number. Tell him or her to add 20 percent to the bill for the waiter, but not to present the bill at the table. Give your office phone number for verification, or if you have to, stop by in advance and sign the bill.
At the end of your meal, watch carefully for the startled expression on your customer’s face when you utter the magic words “Let’s go” and leave him wondering when you signed the check.
By doing a little advance planning you’ve achieved two major objectives: You’ve avoided an awkward moment for your customer by not signing or paying in cash, and you’ve just made the best restaurant in town your own private club.
Do you always buy a car from the same salesperson? Your shoes? Any tangible item? Of course not.
A new car costs more than $30,000 these days; it’s a major purchase decision for anyone. I buy one every couple of years, but I have never once heard from any car salesperson—or any salesperson of any substantial item—once I’d made the purchase from him. No thank-you note. No “We just got a new shipment in.” No nothing.
Yet many of the successful people I know are constantly sending out short notes. Lou Holtz, the University of South Carolina football coach; Pat Fallon, the chairman of one of the nation’s hottest ad agencies; Wheelock Whitney, who built one of the nation’s most successful brokerage firms. They’re all masters of the short note. “I want you to know how much I enjoyed our meeting/your gift/your hospitality/whatever”; “Congratulations on your new financing/house/plant/wife/kid’s performance at tennis/whatever”; “Here’s an item about envelopes/golf/ tennis/marketing seminars/whatever I thought you might be interested in.”
They’re hand-written, hand-stamped, and mailed the same day the item appears or is announced or we’ve had a meeting. It takes only a moment. It’s all a matter of personal recognition and courtesy, as it is to remember names and take a personal interest in the people with whom you work. It’s a major part of the reason why Holtz, Fallon, and Whitney are successful—and why I’ve never bought a car from the same person twice.
Keep this habit in mind even if you’re only on the first or second step of the ladder. A young woman I know, fresh out of Brown University and hot to break into advertising, had about as much chance connecting with a job on Mad Ave as a young actress has of landing a part four blocks west of Madison on Broadway. She struggled through the usual months of rejection and alarming dependence on the medications of Dr. Scholl. Finally, an interview seemed to go well on both sides of the desk. That had happened before and she knew she was a long way from having the job sewn up. She went back to her apartment, composed and typed a creative letter of appreciation, and hand-delivered it that same day to the maybe-boss-to-be. End of story? She got the job—against tough competition—and later learned it was the letter that did the trick.
Every business book will tell you about the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers.
Every business book also will tell you to work that customer list for more business and more prospects.
It’s good advice.
But what about the flip side of that equation? If 20 percent of your customers are 80 percent of your business, then, when you’re the customer and not the salesperson, you’re also 80 percent of the business to 20 percent of your own suppliers.
Look at your supplier list. Shouldn’t these people, who are dependent upon you for their livelihoods, be a major source of both business and prospects?
My suppliers have to get their envelopes from someone. That someone is me.
Ask a roomful of entrepreneurs what the sweetest sound in the world is and they lean toward the crisp crinkle of freshly minted currency or the dull thud of a competitor’s body hitting the pavement.
Ask anyone in the sales game and they’ll tell you that it’s the sound of their name on someone else’s lips.
I know the headmistress of a private school who makes it a practice to learn the names of each of the over one thousand kids attending her school. If they’re new and she hasn’t met them, she learns their names by studying their pictures. On the first day of each year, when the buses arrive to drop off the kids at school, she greets each one by name as they get off the bus. Imagine how reassuring it is to a frightened first-grader, suddenly thrust into strange surroundings, to be recognized immediately by an adult who is in charge of his or her life. Or to the child’s anxious parents who have plunked down $13,000 for tuition. When they ask Junior how it went the first day, they discover that the headmistress of the school has taken a personal interest in their child.
In the twelve years that headmistress has been at the school, enrollment has more than doubled, the school has moved to a grand new facility that is clearly the finest in the area, and the endowment has been increased sixfold. Not all the result of learning those names, of course, but it certainly didn’t hurt to have a headmistress who understood that her performance as a salesperson was as important as her role as an educator.
Knowing what to do isn’t enough if you haven’t developed the self-discipline to do it. The headmistress who learned to recognize her one thousand students had no extraordinary gifts of memory. She learned it the same way she learned Latin when she was a high school freshman. She locked herself in her room every evening for a week and spent the time drilling herself with handmade flash cards. Instead of “Amo, amas, amat” on the one side and “I love, you love, he loves” on the other, there were her students’ pictures on the front and their names on the back.
Most of us quit doing that sort of thing in ninth grade. She didn’t.
It amazes me that so many salespeople are seized by inertia and act as if they can continue to cling to their jobs without having to exert themselves.
I have known successful salespeople who were alcoholics, gamblers, liars, thieves…but I have never known a successful salesperson who sat on his ass all day.
With all of the Anonymous groups we have for dealing with human imperfection, why is it we haven’t organized to combat the most dangerous, expensive, and self-destructive habit of all: wasting time? You can do all those other nasty things and still make a decent living. But if you blow off your nine to fives on useless, time-consuming behavior, you will fail.
A salesperson really has nothing to sell but his time. His product exists independently of anything he adds to it; his personality will win him or lose him accounts initially, but if he isn’t around to provide service and be accessible to his customers, he’ll lose those accounts.
The mark of a good salesperson is that his customer doesn’t regard him as a salesperson at all, but a trusted and indispensable adviser, an auxiliary employee who, fortunately, is on someone else’s payroll.
It takes energy and self-discipline to sell. Your customer doesn’t care if you make the call. You, the salesperson, have to care. Despite all the psychological gimmicks designed to motivate salespeople to make calls, like bullpens, sales contests, sales meetings, and motivational training, salespeople still contrive to find 1,001 ways to avoid investing the one asset they have that will invariably bring results: their time.
Why?
I wish I knew.
But I do know that a salesperson doesn’t have to have the charismatic leadership qualities of Bank One’s Jamie Dimon or eBay’s Meg Whitman to be successful. Just follow one simple rule: Set up a schedule with a fixed number of calls to be made every working day, and complete that schedule. If you make ten stops but only one eyeball-to-eyeball sales call, you’ve made only one call.
As a salesperson, keeping track of your time is the moral equivalent of a dieter counting calories, except you are monitoring your output, not your intake.
It is an absolutely fail-safe method—the only one there is—to ensure success. If you give yourself a reasonable work program and follow it, you’ll hit the top of the charts. It’s my experience that salespeople who do monitor themselves this way actually give themselves a tougher program to follow than their sales managers give them. That’s because we know ourselves well enough to know that our real capacity far exceeds the average expectations others have for us.
Setting goals is simply the long-term version of keeping track of your time. Actually, a three-step process is involved:
When I was in Japan in 1983, we had a series of seminars in which we heard speeches from the leaders of Japan’s largest industrial concerns. We heard from the top officers of Honda, Sony, Mitsubishi, and the head of the biggest enterprise of all, the eighty-eight-year-old president of Matsushita Electric.
Persuading them to speak to us was quite a coup, because the Japanese system is much more rigidly structured than ours, and they regard appearing before the troops in this fashion as somewhat beneath their dignity.
And if giving speeches was regarded as a crude Occidental custom, imagine how they felt about answering questions.
But when our eighty-eight-year-old headliner addressed us, he spoke eloquently and profoundly. Then came the questions:
Question: “Mr. President, does your company have long-range goals?”
Answer: “Yes.”
Question: “How long are your long-range goals?”
Answer: “Two hundred fifty years.”
Question: “What do you need to carry them out?”
Answer: “Patience.”
Sounds like a joke. But if it’s so funny, how come every time we compete with them, they bury us? Everybody and every business need a set of basic goals and beliefs, but most of us are seat-of-the-pants, one-day-at-a-time operators. Our goals are fuzzy and our plans for achieving them nonexistent.
Microsoft says it will deliver on its mission through embracing seven core values:
Add to that formula two powerful pieces of wisdom from standard-bearer Bill Gates: (1) “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” (2) “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Nothing unrealistic there.
Your personal plans and goals don’t even have to be that complicated.
How about a goal like improving your sales ranking one quartile, or adding X more accounts, Y more income, Z more total sales? If that kind of basic planning and goal-setting has helped make Microsoft the Microsoft of business, shouldn’t you be doing it, too?
One of my good friends gave me her definition of a goal, and it’s the best one I’ve ever heard. “A goal is a dream with a deadline.” Write yours down—because that’s the only way you’ll give them the substance they need to force you to carry them out.
Remember the four-minute mile? People had been trying to achieve it since the days of the ancient Greeks. In fact, folklore has it that the Greeks had lions chase the runners, thinking that would make them run faster. They also tried tiger’s milk—not the stuff you get down at the health-food store, but the real thing. Nothing worked. So they decided it was impossible. And for thousands of years everyone believed it. It was physiologically impossible for a human being to run a mile in four minutes. Our bone structure was all wrong. Wind resistance too great. Inadequate lung power. There were a million reasons.
Then one man, one single human being, proved that the doctors, the trainers, the athletes, and the millions and millions before him who tried and failed, were all wrong. And miracle of miracles, the year after Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, thirty-seven other runners broke the four-minute mile, and the year after that three hundred runners broke the four-minute mile.
A few years ago, in New York, I stood at the finish line of the Fifth Avenue Mile and watched thirteen out of thirteen runners break the four-minute mile in a single race. In other words, the runner who finished dead last would have been regarded as having accomplished the impossible a few decades ago.
What happened? There were no great breakthroughs in training. Human bone structure didn’t suddenly improve. But human attitudes did.
Think about the stonecutter: He hammers at his rock a hundred times without denting it. On the hundred-and-first blow, the rock will split in two. You know it is not that blow that did it but all that had gone before. You can accomplish your goals…if you set them. Who says you’re not tougher, smarter, better, harder-working, more able than your competition? It doesn’t matter if they say you can’t do it. What matters, the only thing that matters, is if you say it. Until Bannister came along, we all believed in the experts. Bannister believed in himself…and changed the world. If you believe in yourself, well, then, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish. So don’t quit. Don’t ever quit.
Well, the truth is, we’re not all Bannisters…and we don’t have to be first to succeed. As one famous political figure said, “It’s the pioneers who get all the arrows.”
In the restaurant business, you never want to be the first operator in a location. Usually the place has to pass through three or four sets of hands before there’s a fit between the restaurant, the location, and the market that’s being served.
The trick is to benefit from the Bannisters without having to take the arrows. The people who ran the four-minute mile after Bannister had done it succeeded in large part because they had Bannister as a role model to prove it could be done.
When Bannister accomplished it, the others were able to psych themselves up and do the same thing. Who (or what) is psyching you up? If you think about why you are the way you are, chances are it has a lot to do with trying to be like someone you admired. You observed and you copied that person’s mannerisms. Sometimes, to win his or her approval, you patterned your whole lifestyle after that person. And you didn’t become permanently cynical just because you discovered at age fourteen that Mom and Dad weren’t perfect and that Simon and Garfunkel were right: Joe DiMaggio has gone and he ain’t ever coming back. (In case you don’t remember who Simon and Garfunkel were, don’t worry. One day, they won’t be coming back either.)
You never stop needing role models. The Bannisters and the superstars in every other field keep right on holding role models in front of their eyes long after they’ve become role models themselves. They study them, copy them, compete with them, and even try to surpass them. It doesn’t end with childhood. They’re constantly goading themselves to meet new challenges. They top old role models, then they find new ones. They top themselves, and they set new goals. What better way to measure yourself, to feel good about yourself, and to achieve than trying to be like people whom you admire? Look at yourself in the mirror. If you like what you see, don’t forget that you want to feel the same way tomorrow morning and the morning after.
When you’ve lived in a city like New York, you take your major-league status for granted. But when it’s the Minneapple and not the Big Apple, being in the majors takes on cosmic significance. Lose those teams and you’ve lost your civic identity. Twenty-five years ago, before the Calvin Crisis I described earlier, Minneapolis and St. Paul had their first scare about losing their major-league sports franchises, the Minnesota Twins and the Minnesota Vikings.
The problem was our stadium; it was the standard outdoor variety and for our area hopelessly outdated. Upgrading the stadium wasn’t the answer. With Minnesota’s long winters, any outdoor facility, no matter how modern, is virtually unusable during the last half of the football season and the first few weeks of baseball.
If we were going to keep the teams, we were told, we needed a new stadium.
I’d been a sports nut all my life. I didn’t want to go back to sitting on a wooden bench rooting for a Park Board softball team. I didn’t have the resources to indulge in the ultimate fantasy of buying a team.
So I went to work to try to save our teams by becoming active in the civic program to build a new $75 million stadium, and ultimately I became chairman of the stadium task force. When I started, I thought it would take one year. It took seven. Seven hard, uncertain, frustrating years. Years when most of the time nothing seemed to go right. From the time I got started until the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome was built, I had a fantasy. I would be the one to throw out the first ball. Not the mayor, not the governor, not Joe DiMaggio, but me. I saw it in my mind’s eye a thousand times. And, of course, I finally did it.
That’s what I did when I was thirteen and dreamed of owning a factory. That’s what I did when I owned the factory and dreamed of selling the largest and most prestigious account in town and finally achieved it. In fact, for five years, during the era when men actually wore hats, I had the words “General Mills” pasted inside the crown of my hat so I saw it every time I put my hat on. An absolutely unavoidable way to remind myself of what I had to do.
I came to realize that fantasizing, projecting yourself into successful situations, is one of the most powerful means there is to achieve personal goals.
It’s what an athlete does when he comes onto the field to kick a field goal with three seconds on the clock, sixty thousand people in the stands, thirty million watching on TV, and the game in the balance.
As the kicker begins his move, he automatically makes the hundred tiny adjustments necessary to achieve the mental picture he has formed in his mind so many times…since he was a kid…the picture of himself kicking the winning field goal. Great athletes seem to have something in common: the ability to project. Even in the middle of the action, they see things happen a split second before they happen.
Human survival itself very often depends on a kind of future vision, seeing oneself in specific situations as a healthy, thriving, creative person.
There was a study done of concentration camp survivors. What were the common characteristics of those who did not succumb to disease and starvation in the camps? I met a man named Victor Frankl who was a living answer to that. He was a successful Viennese psychiatrist before the Nazis threw him into such a camp. “There is only one reason,” he said in a speech, “why I am here today. What kept me alive was you. Others gave up hope. I dreamed. I dreamed that someday I would be here, telling you how I, Victor Frankl, had survived the Nazi concentration camps. I’ve never been here before, I’ve never seen any of you before, I’ve never given this speech before. But in my dreams, in my dreams, I have stood before you and said these words a thousand times.”
Dream on.
Did you ever notice how many people happen to work in office buildings more than one story in height?
And how many of these same people happen to look out the window from time to time?
Paint your company name and/or logo on the top of your trucks. It costs practically nothing. Advertisers spend sums that would dazzle even a TV evangelist to capture a sliver of a major urban market. In a world where advertisers spend a fortune just to be on the back of ticket envelopes, the painless gimmick of painting the top of your trucks is ignored. We’ve been doing it for forty years, and we’re known locally as, you guessed it, “the company that paints its name on the top of its trucks.” What I’ve never been able to figure out is why everyone else doesn’t do it.
Paint your wagon.
All you have to do is make him think it’s his idea.