I Read All of The Crap on Sales and Marketing Ever Written So You Won’t Have To

I set out to consume and digest everything ever written about sales. I’ll die 10 times over before I actually accomplish that in reality and I almost died attempting to scratch the surface.

In truth it’s boring. Terribly boring. Trust me… just read this article and get back to work.

I was going to title this piece: “6 Ways to Avoid Becoming That Awful Jerkface Played by Alec Baldwin on Glengarry Glen Ross” but that’d be too cliche. Also, I hear Alec Baldwin was pretty much typecast. Did you see the movie? Probably not but you’ve seen that scene where Baldwin assaults a chalkboard with the alphabet.

Go watch the scene if only to help you grasp why Ed Harris looks so old in West World. Hint: he is that old.

Look I’ve been in some form of sales all my life. Daniel Pink will tell you we’re all salesman. His book To Sell Is Human is pretty much like every other book he wrote: “your brain is awesome but probably screwed up and here’s what you can do to help it before your Adderral-induced lifestyle kills you at your desk.” — I believe that’s a direct quote.

(Back to my digest of massive reams of sales books, articles and info you never had the time to deal with and hopefully won’t deal with after your read the rest of this article.)

Office Space!

Oh. I also considered entitling this piece: “Your Functional and Organizational Marketing and Line Sales Staff-Structure-Workflow Should be Burned to Ashes and Spread Over the Desks of Any Xerox PSS Creators Still Alive.” Actually, I hear Don Hammalian is a really cool guy but there almost as many articles on “needs-based” selling as there are slides that Mary Meeker just produced in the last 5 minutes. That’s a lot of articles.

Don’t get me wrong. Having a sales strategy to go sell something is a good thing but there a very few original people doing anything original in sales these days. I really want to like the CEB Challenger sale methodology I really do… but it’s basically a re-purposed version of the altruistic “value-add” schtick I here from any model that isn’t PSS. But I gotta hand it to CEB… they put out so much content out there that I’ll never get around to reading.

But I digress….

Ok, ok I’m just delaying the inevitable… here’s what I learned from all those hours I wasted so you won’t have to.

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I can’t remember now… so I’ll just go with what I know myself:

1. If you have a high priced product you’re probably going to have to spend more money to get a customer. (I know — shocker). Don’t skimp. There is no free lunch. There is no Cliff Notes here to skip doing the work. The Universe knows when its being cheated.
2. If your profits aren’t terribly high though I recommend you take Peter Thiel’s advice: buy out your competition or find something else more original to do… I mean really, if profits aren’t that high it’s likely competition is off the charts. Why would you do that to yourself? I know, I know… competition is validation of your space… I know, I know… imitation is the best form of flattery. Get over it. Go make something new in this world. You’re not going to make any money on this.
3. Are you still with me? OK… if you have a high priced product and margins are so-so you need to ask yourself. Why haven’t you shot yourself yet? If I offered you a million dollars to pursue this dream… would you tattoo the words: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” on your forehead? Well, I don’t have a million dollars but you should consider that tattoo still. More importantly you should wake every morning with those thoughts on your lips. Passion is the only thing that matters for success. Passion and spending money on marketing. And making money in the end because you thought of someething original.
4. So, you’re passionate, you have a fantastically original product, you have pretty good margins… what else? Oh… you can’t do this alone. (I forget that one a lot). Go find some schmucks who have the same tattoo and convince them that they need to sell your stuff. Note: if you have a high priced product you’ll need more of these folks… if it’s a lower priced product… ignore these people when you find them on the streets.
5. So big price, profits, passion, tattooeded zombies for your sales team… now you need to figure out how this thing called a funnel works. This is not your college chug funnel this one is a fine piece of instrumentation. I’ll make this simple: go buy Salesforce, go buy Pardot. Easy button. Done.
6. Now. Are you in an existing marketing place of purchasing? By that I mean can you set up shop somewhere in real life or unreal life (aka “the interwebs”) and people can find you immediately? If the answer is yes… then you’re awesome. Good to go. You can stop reading really. If the answer is no… then go spend more money. Seriously, if people buy the type of product you offer in a specific place but you’re not there… you should probably reconsider some things like life and how little you’re spending on marketing. So you’ll need to fill the “top of the funnel” — again, not with beer, but with prospects.
7. Now that the funnel is full of prospects because you took my advice that a) high priced product with b) decent margins and c) being sold outside of the usual market of competitors needs d) A BOATLOAD OF MONEY AND PEOPLE TO GET ANYWHERE, you’ll need e) a plan to divvy up the people who have come to your website to laugh at you because of your prediciment and the people who may actually be on some crazy kick and want or even need your product. If your product is pretty low cost then do everything on the aforementioned “Interwebs” — do not read any further and no I will not buy your Instagram competitor product… Snapchat already did that. Or, did I get that in reverse?
8. So you have your high priced product with margins to buy Nintendo Switch units for each of your kids (do this immediately). You’ve also determined that since there’s not a cult-like gathering of customers in one place that you’re going to have to spend a boat load of money and hire a bunch of sharp-looking people who happen to have facial tattoos. You’ve also taken the time to buy Saleforce and Pardot on my recommendation and set it up so poor people who will never buy your product are sent to the worse looking crew of inked servants you’ve hired so that when they’re not entertaining your kids playing Legend of Zelda they can sift through the poor people and make a call or two to find someone who is willing to sell their firstborn to actually buy your product. It’s a long shot but they call these folks SDRs as in “Seriously Desperate Reps-in-training-who-want-a-better-life-than-entertaining-these-kids-playing-video-games.” The prospects who actually want to buy your products you send to the other people you hired who are not such slackers as playing video games all day. See… easy.
9. If absolutely necessary — and it may be because you’ve opted to create a product and service which people may want but can’t find — you may need to hire hitmen. No, I’m serious, these people (the good ones) are hard to find.. you’ll have to pay outrageous sums for them and probably more over the table (aka expense accounts) and they’ll find a small handful of people every day to chat with and probably go nowhere… but it’s what you have to do. (Seriously, best case is maybe 2% win rate).
10. Last item. Once you have your high priced item out there with decent margins, a cabal of brainwashed face-scared sales reps to repeat magic words you’ve given to them call “scripts”… once you’ve logged all of this into Salesforce and Pardot and put out a boatload of money in marketing digital, offline, online and a dozen other areas I will list later (maybe)… now you need to see what kind of mess you’ve created and go back to the drawing board.

Oh… I guess I could regurgitate some learnings like: be nice to your customers, challenge them to swallow your product whole because its good for them like Salesforce and Pardot are good for you… once you have that all down pat then you can sit back and collect all your money because daddy hasn’t gotten his Nintendo Switch yet. And I need one.

End.