Long ago in a desert far far away near Tim Wilson's house in the sand, I got to spend the day with the retired former VP of Sales for Frigidaire Corporation.
He was a great guy and he taught me a lot of great things in a day.
One of the things that he told me was this: "Ron, if I had someone like you on my team, I gave them a script. If in a week they could not recite the script verbatim, they were gone. But if in two weeks time if they were still using it, they were gone."
Translation?
He said that the point was that if you are going to sell something, you need to "mentally be in contact" with what you are trying to sell. It needs to be so much a part of your nature that you can reel off the pitch verbatim if you had to. But the magic comes in when you are so skilled at that, that you can shift gears and tweak and modify the presentation to play to the rapidly changing circumstances.
Tim Wilson and I use this approach all the time. We script and rehearse the pitch we are going to make. We practice it back and forth until we get so good at it that it rolls off the two of us. Then when we go in to make our presentations, we can quickly drop and add and modify things based on how things are developing.
I have always thought that "if you can't do the script in a week, you are gone -- but if you are still using it in two weeks, you are gone" is a pretty good mental starting point when making sales pitches.
Works for us.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
A 2011 FOLIO: 40 honoree as one of the 40 most influential publishers in America
http://www.creativecow.net
Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
"Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm." - Woody Allen
