I had a meeting yesterday with a young salesman. It was a great experience. – in the same way that meeting with the developers and writers and designers I meet with is a great experience. I love the enthusiasm I am experiencing around me. People who excel usually do so because they are enthralled by the doing of whatever it is that they are excelling at. And this guy seems to love what he does. That’s great. We had a nice conversation.
At one point, I was talking about how I loved sales now because I have been able to eliminate negotiation from the process. Some people love to negotiate. I do not. It seems strange to me to do so. Think about it. You sit down with someone and you spell out a way that if you both put a specific thing in, then you both will come out ahead. Then you shrink into a sparring stance. It’s like me saying to you, “Hey you put in five bucks and I put in five bucks, and we can get a pizza for us both to eat.” You say, “OK.” Then I say, “OR you put in six dollars and I’ll put in four.” That’s dumb.
Look at the way products are sold at Big Box. They just put a price on it and ring it at the register. Since I developed our current system of Time-On-Task Web Staff (that’s what I like to call it), we just function like staff that works by the hour. There’s no price on anything we do except the time of the person that it took to do it. It’s completely activities based. Thus in discussing with a prospect the idea of building a web application or managing a content program or whatever, it is not the deliverable that is being purchased. The deliverable is the articulated goal. The client is buying hours of activity put towards achieving that goal.
I guess there could be negotiation in the cost of the hour (the hourly rate), but we publish our rate and our discount programs (like 10% off for the purchase of 100 hours).
Regardless, my point is that I love selling because it is just problem solving. If you approach it that way and create systems that treat it that way, then being at the table with a prospect is a fun and engaging experience, like two kids in preschool sitting at a table doing a puzzle together. It’s how we make friends with people.