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.

Just about every Sunday I race my sailboat in a fleet out on the lake I live by. We try to go for just over 2 hours, depending on the wind and that means a course of 5 to 15 miles. I have a big boat and race other folks with big boats, we all depend on our crews to make the boat work right, to squeeze the best possible speed at all times on all tacks. We have a strategist, a tactician, guys who make the motor perform (in this case the motor is the sails), and some who drives the boat. We have a management team. For those of you who care, the driver is not in charge (more about that in a later blog).

After 2 and half hours and miles of water on a nice sunny day you can win or lose by an inch, which in that sense is no different that a foot, a yard, a furlong, or a league; you lose and that’s it. It means that every second of the race is critical and any mistakes can be fatal in terms of getting to the finish line first. Because we all make mistakes the general rule is that the guy who makes the fewest mistakes that day wins. Sure you can be second, or third, and still get iron (a trophy at the end of the event), but, well, you understand. Oh yea, there’s nothing for fourth place.

I depend on a team, skill and communication are critical, mistakes happen and they suck, there is no time off, once you cross the start line you are in the on mode for every second until you cross the finish. Let your attention drift on for a minute and you pay the bill.

Martin Luther King used to talk about keeping your eye on the prize, don’t get distracted or diverted, always focus on why you are there.

Does that sound anything like business?

Welcome to shared realities.

The other day I was involved in an email thread about bulk mailing. While we on the thread generally agreed that bulk mailing was a bulk waste of time I had brought up a process I had used with some degree of success.  This process involved sending out post-cards with only one word on them.  My theory for doing this was that a post card with one word on it can not be denied, that someone can’t pick the card up and not read the one word as they throw it into the trash.  With this action I have gained brain-space, even if only for a fraction of a second, I got in through the noise, my “word” was in their brain.

“So what?” you might ask.  What does this do for you?

Well consider that you do it a couple of times. That word becomes an accepted data-point.   One way to look at it is brand recognition, you know that brand word.  Maybe you don’t know anything about it but you know the word, it is familiar and in that familiarity it becomes comfortable and perhaps non-threatening.  But it comes with a question.   What is it?

Remember the book/movie “The Manchurian Candidate”? A post hypnotic set of commands is activated with a single word.  Perhaps this is the reverse, a post-hypnotic curiosity is activated by the word.

So you cold-call the individual you sent the cards to and say the “word” in the introduction, the first words you get out before they hang the phone up.   Could this stop them from closing their mind?   Could this keep the door open long enough to get a second or third word in?  Could they be curious enough to ask what it all means?   Could you have a dialog as a result?  Could it lead to a sale?

One word.  What word would you choose?

I would like to offer some supporting thoughts as to the value of the bootstrap process, the wisdom of your choice to follow it, and the ultimate practicality of it today.  First a couple of quotes:

Forbes this month (Jan 2009 ) “The venture capital industry is staring at the most vicious shakeout in its  history . . . Returns are pathetic for most funds, [and] the public offering pipeline on which venture depends for its exit strategy is clamped shut.”

Bloomberg.com, “IPOs historically dry up at the end of a bear market and don’t begin to recover for months after a  rally as issuers and investors wait for signs of stability.”

During the last quarter, 38 companies withdrew or postponed their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Bloomberg says “it may take until 2011 for the number of companies going public to return to their 2007 level, according to data compiled by the University of Florida. While the S&P 500 rose an average of 24 percent in the first year after a market plunge, the data show, it takes 34 months on average for underwriting to return to its rate at the start of a slowdown.”

Companies pursuing the traditional VC or investor routes are running into brick walls or valuations that are ridiculous

Yet this is one of the best times to start a business.

We are in a world rich with new technologies, applications of those technologies, services that can be based on those technologies, and perceptions based on those technologies that open unimaginable doors.

Even better, established businesses whose inertia, that is inability to change and adapt, and whose debt or commitment (financial, political, or social) are now untenable are thus going on the rocks and leaving unsatisfied customers with unfulfilled appetites looking for solutions.

This is possibly one of the best times in recent history to apply the bootstrap techniques creating your fortune.  I wish you well and in these stormy times expect to see good results for you on your journey down a good path, stick to it.

Happy New Year and New Era, Barry

The Evangelists is can be considered a negotiator if you broaden the horizon for a minute. While the Evangelist is interested in winning hearts and minds this is really a negotiation, this action is in many ways not much different than a seller and buyer engaged in a transaction. In this case the Seller has an idea, change of attitude or conviction he want to sell. This will lead to a conduct change as its effects settle in on the prospective buyer. The Buyer has his own agenda, most of which is not to change.

Adam Galinsky of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, and his colleagues spent some time with MBA students looking into two very successful approaches used in straight on negotiations. The essence of their work was that these approaches, perspective-taking and empathy yielded still the best results (this just reconfirms that understanding, this is not a new revelation). Please note that Perspective-taking is the cognitive power to consider the world from someone else’s viewpoint, whereas empathy is the power to connect with them emotionally and that Perspective-taking was as much as twice as effective.

So what does this mean for the Evangelist (or pitchman for that matter)?

It says you must know and respect your audience objectively or intellectually as well as emotionally to be really effective. Evangelism is not just a great pitch; it is a great negotiation! The goal is to gain a soul, which is to affect the wisdom on the individuals as well as the intellect and emotions. So there are three elements on the table that have to be considered. We must win the heart, mind, and soul to truly have succeeded with our evangelic approach to getting someone to in effect ‘change sides’. In the end all this about getting people to do what we think is right, for the entrepreneur ‘right’ ultimately deals with gowning his business. Even with a Kick-Butt product and the resources to get to market, owning and defending the ownership of market space still means winning hearts, minds, and soul.

More thoughts on this to come.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

The Entrepreneur has access to many methodologies to affect the growth of his venture. All are efforts to reach the ‘critical mass’ needed to become a perpetuating and sustainable enterprise. Once this state is achieved there is a further cost and burden in defending the growth position against both the passions and apathy if the competition and the customer alike.

Evangelism is one of the most effective tools to deal with both stages and is not just limited to the technology world. Its effects cover all ranges of human endeavors. This tool is so much more than just arm waving and an enthusiastic presentation. It is in fact a venture-wide state-of-mind that is totally manageable and results in the most profound form of the network-effect based growth. It can be implemented in a ‘fuel-efficient’ and long lasting way that result in a market-dominating wins for its users.

So what are these techniques? Over the next few blog entries I would like to explore this further. Lets start with the basics. First in the Evangelist’s toolbox is simple propaganda. This word had gotten a bum wrap over the last century because the guys who did it really well were what we consider very bad guys. We use the same techniques but don’t like to call it propaganda; in its lighter form we call it ‘messaging’. But when done with vigor is it plain old propaganda.

I just finished a book called ‘True Enough – Learning to live in a Post-Fact Society’. One of the fundamental tenants of the author is that new technologies are prompting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact. What he has missed is that this is history, this transition occurred a long time ago and is one of the fundamental rules that the evangelist works under. Facts are without passion (I call them ‘isms’) and humans are passionate emotional characters, although today we can employ both therapeutic and recreational drugs to change that.

Evangelism works on modifying ones beliefs and looks for factual structures to support those beliefs. Sounds terrible eh? Well maybe that’s just another belief. And beliefs are malleable; facts are only deniable.

More in round 2, see ya

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

I had an interesting meeting with a Technology Evangelist this week. A very affable fellow, he kept telling me that the goal of Technology Evangelism was to make his product the Defacto Standard. I remarked to him that it sounded like the definition from Wikipedia, which I don’t wholly concur with. He told me he wrote part of that definition, so I probed further. It seems he worked for THE Big Software OS Company. His job was to make the people who liked the smaller operating systems such as Unix, Linux, and Apple and hated the company he represented, to accept the Big Guy. His functional view of evangelism was to reinforce the Big Guy’s market domination.

The goal of evangelism is certainly to win hearts and minds. All forms of evangelism are really propaganda, so in many ways he was right. But it is a soulless kind of evangelism when done by a bully. Evangelism works best when it stems from, and bases itself on, some fundamental righteousness. Being righteous and being big are two different things. When a lot of people hate you there is something wrong at the root of the matter. When the contest is between hate and love I feel that evangelism becomes a different art. Hate and love are two sides of passion.

We all know that the opposite of love is not hate; it is apathy. Not caring is a far stronger barrier than hating. It is easier to get someone who hates you to love you, for it is just turning around the passion that already exists. But the true mastery of the art is to get someone who doesn’t give a damn to care! Ah, that is the mastery of the craft, and it was clear that just becoming the defacto standard was far short of creating passion from apathy. Such is the bully’s path. You must decide when you step into the world of evangelism whether you are going to seduce the mind or the soul. I prefer the heart, for it is always true. That is just my operational opinion, each to his own.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved