Barry W Thornton Blog

Hi there, I have been off-line for about two months doing the 10 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week thing bringing life to a bootstrap start-up I started, fitting the family in has left no time to think or write about anything not related to product development and then sales of my stuff. But this is not about me; it’s about customers and sales.

My product caters to the contemporary Carriage Trade. What’s that you say (I heard that you know, these blogs are two-way . . . sometimes, depends on if I a listening, and I have selective hearing)? Carriage Trade refers to the retailers of old who had no front door; you could only get in by having your carriage enter through a portal to a vestibule. That’s class-

Prices are very high, margins are, well, GREAT. But it is an emotional sale that deals with vanity. The point is that after all this work anyone in my company that even mentions the word ‘discount’ is looking for a pink slip. A killer value prop, and oh yea, we don’t even advertise and sales are, well, justifying it all.

High price, niche market with almost universal appeal, lots of pull. How do you do it?

First of all most other entrepreneurs I run across are thinking in old (10 years ago, how long is that . . . let me tell you, a long f**king time ago!) models, too much internet, failure to really understand the tribal approach, lousy sensitivity to customers, too much sensitivity to people like themselves thinking they are the customer, incremental product, and most fundamentally little or no transformational qualities (see Pine and Gillmore, it’s all about the leading edge of the new-old economy).

Thus you now have all the clues to figure it out. Am I going to tell you how to think to find your own version of my path.

Hell No!

I can’t. Like the old crazy Werner Erhard dude said, even if I tell you, you won’t get IT. It’s not intellectual, it’s emotional, you have to feel it, and there is no way that I tell you how to feel something, you learn to feel it by picking up the bread crumbs such as those I have dropped above, fill in the blank spaces, “feel the Force Luke”, your intuition will tell you. Then you do something entirely crazy, you take the leap, ignore all those SOBs that try to tell you what is right, commit, go crazy, and win the day.

Welcome to the new-old world. Go kick your bankers butt.

Adaos Amigos.

Barry the Curmudgeon

The other night I went to a meeting to listen to a guy who wrote a book about marketing. I took my 19year old son; I try to expose him to everything even though his current ambition is to be a code monkey. I was smart enough to sit us in the back so we could sneak out early; the guy talking was a putz. A college professor who saw some simple things and churned a book out on it. He did studies, set up and ran three years of tests, in essence he re-invented the wheel. He was so full of himself for his discovery, and most of the audience was mesmerized. Why do people think they can find IT in a book? And what had he discovered and proven in such a complex way?

COMMON SENSE

When I was 18 through 21 I worked in a carriage-trade hi-fi salon run by an old merchant named Paul Holtz. He had sold cloths, jewelry, and at that point hi-fi. [Carriage-trade refers to retail stores a couple of generations ago. Hi-end shops did not have street access, you had to have your carriage driven through a port into a courtyard where you alighted onto a portico, customers stepped out the carriage right into the salon. If wanted to walk in you used the trade entrance and you were not a customer. Thus you started your buying experience for that store with a grand entrance.].

I didn’t want to be a salesman but I needed the money so I did what Paul said, constantly think about your experience as a customer and it’s easy. High-end sales were and still are an experience event. Always KISS to the ‘n’th degree, way beyond just the words Keep It Simple Stupid, and always remember that value was in the eye of the beholder, which is driven by his dreams. It is your job is to manipulate, fulfill, and harvest those dreams. Always offer three choices (avoiding the ‘tyranny of choice‘, good stuff for my next blog) and keep the best one locked to create a final theatrical stage to work on. Most of all always remember that from the first awareness of the product (or service) to the final delivery it is dance and both partners know it. Dance well!

Well this professor had discovered some of what this old merchant naturally did based simply on watching people, no collage education needed. And guess what? Every bit of it is common sense. There is no magic, only an honest understanding of how you buy, and how others buy. No special words to write down in a lecture, no special SEO stuff, no book long explanations, only simple thoughts you already know. We are all trained consumers, your mom pushed you around in a shopping cart when you were a year old and your education began. - -So what is my point? KISS! You don’t need gurus, mentors, professors or the like. You do need to look inside yourself because you already have experienced all you need to market and sell successfully; only your personal fear (my definition of ‘the box’) blocks you from seeing it and executing it fearlessly and flawlessly.

And remember, everything starts with a sale. Sell first, then analyze

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved