| How not to sell | | Print | |
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Even though Michel de Montaigne has been dead for over 400 years, I admire the fellow. So much of what he said in his essays makes sense today.
One of his gems is, “Having learned little from good examples, I make use of bad ones, which offer me everyday lessons.” So I’ll tell you the story of my first outside sales call more than twenty years ago. It is a lesson in what not to do.  Salesman
I’d been offered a sales job selling, by what today’s standard would be, a very crude computer presentation system. A friend had got me the job. Both of us had no sales training. We did manage to make an appointment to show our equipment to a company in the plush offices of the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco.
Now the thing we hadn’t quite thought through was our attire. Let’s just say we were casual. This was at the time when business and casual did not appear in the same sentence. Not only that, my friend had a rather old car that had recently suffered some damage. It looked sick. We did not exude confidence and success.
We had not practiced setting up the equipment, nor had we thought why our presentation would make sense to this organization. In fact, we knew nothing about what the organization did.
We were told we could park in the basement. We took the elevator up to the ground level, and lugged our equipment to the main elevators. We looked more like service people than salesmen.
I was not prepared for the opulence the boardroom in which sat some twenty Armani-clad executives. We set up the equipment and proceeded to speed through the things it could do. My partner was doing the talking. He was talking very fast and gesturing with his hands. I think this was a nervous reaction. I was nervous.
He tripped over the power cord. The machine went blank. He careened across the room into an executive lap. I do not recommend doing this. But it did liven the meeting up.
He got back up on his feet and asked if there were any questions. Now this was a good thing. Asking questions is what salespeople are supposed to do.
Surprisingly enough, there were some real questions of interest. That was a good thing. The bad thing was we were not clear about how to answer them.
As we waited in the hall for the elevator, my partner said, “We blew it. They’ll never buy from us.” What he didn’t realize was that one of the men in the meeting was standing right behind him. He got in the elevator with us. It was hard to know what to say at this point.
When we reached the ground floor we crossed the lobby and waited for the parking elevator. “We really won’t sell this thing now that guy overheard us,” said my partner. “Did they think system was temperamental?”
As fortune would have it, the same fellow was now standing behind us again. He too was going to the parking garage. We all got into the elevator and went down. I felt a certain stiffness.
We all got off at the same floor. We had by now struck up some kind of stilted conversation with him as we walked to our car. Every car in the garage was new, except ours. There were shiny BMW’s and Mercedes and we were fast approaching the tired and battered heap that was to carry us back across the Bay Bridge. What would he think if we got into it?
We kept on walking. At last, he went one way. We ducked into the stairwell. Our plan was to wait for him to leave and then come out and drive away.
But as we waited we could hear footsteps approaching. We could see that it was him. He was coming into the stairwell. We lugged our equipment up the stairs. Now, he was walking up the stairs. We went to the next floor. The door to the street was locked. We were trapped!
We encountered him on the stairs. All he said was, “Can’t you find your car either?” We said that we couldn’t.
We didn’t make the sale. But learning what not to do is as valuable as learning what to do. |
