Barry W Thornton Blog

I received a note from James on my blog about fighting the price battle in a salesman’s mind, he notes:

“What if the problem is the inability to listen and the urge to react without thinking it through? Sometimes I think that’s why we are going downhill.”

Thank you James, good insights and I agree with you.  I don’t think I can find many who will argue that the school system stopped teaching critical and analytical thinking as well as listening a long time ago so the problem is not recent.

But the sales process is designed to handle this.  Given that the basic sales dance consists of:

1 - Introduction - establish credibly and trust

2 - Define the problem you are addressing to get everyone clear on the terms and on the same page

3 - Present a solution that has value to the customer, explain that value proposition, answer clarifying questions

4 - Do a ground clearing Close (push the customer to a start making choices).

5 - Objections - Listen to the objections from the customer, go back to #2 with a modified presentation. Loop through #2 through #5 until until there is either a close, you progress to the next Gate Keeper, you agree to meet again with more data, or they carry your broken body out the door.

Built into this process is the ability to handle James’ issues if you instead have ‘the ability to listen and the personal power to think it through” (thanks James).

This means you must be clever and devious in many ways.  It all falls on the salesman’s brain, dummies don’t sell well.  In fact sales is one of the highest mental arts there is.  All that stuff about rocket scientists, mathematician, etc. is a load of snow (I know, I am one).  They don’t require 1/10 the mental effort as does a good salesman.  In science you have years to figure out the truth of a matter - in sales you have only minutes, maybe only seconds to figure it out, make a plan, and act on that plan.  I find sales infinitely more fun and exhilarating than sitting my office working on epiphanies, which goes to the heart of the matter - nothing ever happens until a  sale is made!

Great ideas happen all the time (and most have little or no value), great closes are as rare as flowers in a snowstorm and even more valuable because they make the world work.

Thank you David Farragut, yes, forget the torpedoes, open up the throttle and kick your life into gear.

We may be looking at the great but final age of the Entrepreneur as we know it. I have a theory that I call the “moo-cow” society. It has nothing to do with politics, or economics, it has to do with society in general and the political/economic reality that drives. I see a world 40 years from now (2 generations that is) where we Type-A characters are, well, lets just say there are a lot fewer of us, and our “A-ism” has an entirely different focus. A society of forced equals where everybody has pretty much the same and conformal. We get a handle on poverty at the cost of the general wealth of the top-end and diversity at the cost of uniqueness. I see this not because of any social justice or morality issue, but simply because that’s the way you put 13 billion people on this planet without them all trying to kill each other. We practice a form of husbandry on the herd of mankind to get predictable and controllable results. Fortunately I will be dead because I find this repugnant, but this is only an opinion and oh, by the way, I am not asking you to believe my theory.

But if I am even close to right, for all this to happen, we really need to be the last generation of unconstrained go-getters. The entrepreneur way of life as we know it needs to change so as to be less unpredictable, less disruptive, less individual. The values in such a society will be aesthetic rather than material. Spiritualism, art and internal reflection will be the basis of the value system; I doubt the dollar, as we understand it now, will be in circulation

Now the political part. Our current new government is adjusting us to this new society. It doesn’t know that it is doing this because our political heroes are just seeking power in the old and ususal way, don’t think that far ahead regardless of what they say.

I tell you this not to get into an argument with you (don’t send me any emails with your opinions, they will go unread and unanswered). I tell you this so you will understand that this is the last great gasp of entrepreneurship as we now know it, 10 years from now it will be, well, different . . . and you won’t like it. So now is the time to make the push to follow your dream. About the time you succeed the rules will be changing in such a way as to assure that no one will be following you. It will be time to take the money and run.

I have always said that the entrepreneur state of mind is lonely; in the future it will be socially unacceptable too. So bask in the glow now, do your ‘thing’ and love it. Welcome to the new reality.