Barry W Thornton Blog

I have commented in the past on the fact that most sales people are clerks, they take orders, kiss the appropriate places on the customer’s body, and really don’t bring home the bacon. In many ways this is good from some business’s viewpoint, it assures that the sales folks essentially MRs (thanks to the Firesign Theater*, MRs are Multiple-Revendables as in disposables). Replace them frequently.

Can you scale sales this way? Two answers, only without competition is one, the other is that Marketing does the closing so Marketing becomes the salesman. Remember, clerks don’t take business away from others, salesmen do.

So in the competitive environment of the 21^st Century how do you scale? Differentiation in the offering, Value Proposition, pricing, messaging or the like? Some or all of that works for a while but unless the completion is brain-dead it is only a short-term solution. The fact is that you need two things, differentiation to kick start and closers to take business away from someone else and finish. Both say that you will always moving, changing what you have to offer and taking someone else’s customer to offer it to. In essence, doing and seeking.

That’s why I call it foraging. How long do think mankind has been foraging for the next meal?  Have we figured it out yet?

*If you have never listened to the FireSign Theater of 40 years ago you are spending time learning what the past could have thought you about today, Their deadly accurate prediction of the then future culture that we live in today has saved me a lot of time. It’s that old ‘I’ve seen this movie before’ forward looking hindsight that is one of the visions that let’s me cut to the chase and reality check with such ease.

Tags: Entrepreneur, firesign theater, foraging, sales, scaling

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Technolgy and business philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.