Bursts of Color - Nothing Changes Without Sales
Last week my early Yelp teammate Pete Hancock posted an old email titled Sales: A Manifesto. Here's a taste:
Nothing changes without salespeople.
Ideas don't spread. Companies don't grow. Problems don't meet their simple solutions.
Salespeople say yes when others say no.
Salespeople believe that life is too short to sit on the sidelines and hope for change and action. You gotta go and get it.
Actually, We're All in Sales
While only some of us have Sales in our titles, it should go without saying that all leadership requires selling. No capital gets raised, employee hired or teamwork accomplished without it. What was Steve Jobs if not the consummate salesperson?
A Sales Lesson for Kids
One day a few years back, my then-twelve-year-old son and his baseball teammates were tasked with selling raffle tickets as a team fundraiser. The setting was a little league ballpark, and the idea was that each pair of kids would sell something like 100 tickets to parents at the park. A fascinating scene unfolded in three acts:
For the first hour, my son and his partner stood behind a folding table with a Raffle Tickets Here sign, and "took orders" from anyone who happened to walk up. They sold maybe 10 tickets that hour.
Unsatisfied with that pace, they began walking through the crowd and asking attendees "Would you like to buy a raffle ticket?" This proactivity changed the game; they sold ~30 tickets in the next half hour.
They then refined this approach and moved up-market with the line: "How many raffle tickets would you like?" They sold the remaining ~60 tickets in about fifteen minutes.
I know which distribution model I'd prefer...