The Sales Profession: Attention Must Still Be Paid

By BEN STEIN
Published: April 25, 2009

ASIDE from some gardening and baby-sitting in my neighborhood when I was a child, my first summer job was in the summer of 1962, just before my first year of college. It was at Shoe Giant, a large discount shoe store in Langley Park, in Prince George’s County of Maryland, and I got the job thanks to a high school pal who also worked there.

The job entailed selling shoes. The shoes were tossed about in giant bins and some were stored in boxes. Once the customers had picked out the kind of shoes they wanted, my task was to find the right size, close the sale, write up a receipt with my sales clerk number on it and escort the customer to the cashier. (A pair of shoes there was rarely more than $10 — and was often less.)

I made not much more than a dollar an hour, as well as a small commission. I recall that my first week’s paycheck was about $70.

I did not stay at that job for long. Later that summer, my mother found me a job at the Civil Service Commission, where I sat at a desk and added numbers on an ancient Marchant machine with a crank, to find Civil Service health insurance payment data for various kinds of injuries and sicknesses. I hated that job, but I did it anyway. I missed Shoe Giant. I missed the drama of selling.

Even after all these years, and after many other jobs, my mind often returns to my brief stint as a shoe salesman. It was then, amid that tangle of sandals, sneakers, oxfords, high heels and brogans, that I discovered the ballet that is sales. Forever after, I have had a deep respect for selling and for salesmen and saleswomen.

Sales — when done right — is more than a job. It is an art. It is a high-wire act. It is, as Arthur Miller immortally said, being out there “on a smile and a shoe shine.” It is learning the product you are selling, learning it so well that you can describe it while doing a pirouette of smiles for the customer and talking about the latest football scores. It is knowing human nature so well that you can align the attributes of your product or service cleanly with the needs and wants of your customers.

At its best, selling is taking a doubt and turning it, jujitsu style, into a powerful push. Selling is making the customer feel better about spending money — or investing it — than he would have felt by keeping his wallet zipped.

I have special memories of people who have sold brilliantly.

In 1976, when I moved to Los Angeles, I desperately wanted a Mercedes 450 SLC, a car that was — even in used form — far more than I deserved or could afford at my entry-level, highly tenuous work as a scriptwriter. My salesman at Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills, Larry Anish, listened to my objections and simply asked, “Don’t you believe in your own future?” Of course, I bought the car.

Many years later, an insurance broker came to call on my wife about disability insurance. I scoffed at him and told him how incredibly unlikely it was that a healthy woman like my wife would ever be disabled. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what we think, too. That’s why it’s so cheap and pays so much if she does get disabled.”

I bought the policy, and when my wife did get temporarily disabled, it paid off magnificently and we needed it.

When in doubt about any aspect of human interaction, I always consult the best salesman I have ever known, Barron Thomas, real estate and airplane salesman extraordinaire, and occasional writer, who could sell oil to the Saudis.

In particular, I’ve come to love insurance sales representatives. After many years of skepticism, and despite many warnings from consumer “experts,” I have come to believe that you can rarely have too much insurance, and that whatever insurance you don’t have is exactly what you will wind up needing. The fact that so many people in insurance sell you what’s good for you, even when smart alecks are telling you not to buy it, makes their work extremely impressive. I wish I had paid more attention to them.

People who work in sales often sit next to me on airplanes, which are my true home. In “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller also wrote: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” Those who are in sales are always aware that the next sale is behind the next door, and they are always great companions. They are where the rubber of production meets the road of consumption, whether in a showroom or a studio or on the phone or calling you at home. When the recovery starts, they will be the ones making purchases happen.

Lawyers and doctors and dentists and politicians and accountants and actors — all of us sell something, every day and every time we meet someone. For me, it all goes back to Shoe Giant, 47 years ago, and I wish that every 17-year-old I know could have that experience. It takes some ability at sales to believe in your own future, no matter what that future may be.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.

On The Net : The New York Times

There was a Twitip blog post on the Intangibility of Twitter Results. I made the following comment on the article. Reason being – Too many Twitter users pay sole attention to marketing based on tweet updates and building their follow list. Twitter is more than that.

Twitter is a great sales platform if your primary business is Twitter relevant. What I mean is this. Twitter has yet to evolve into the great sales and commerce platform everyone expects it to be right from the onset. In due time it will. However, we have seen sales rise a 1000 fold since we cater to the core Twitter demographics of developers and business services reliant on the Twitter api.

Twitter is also an investment model as it is a usage tool. We invested in Twitter and our clients are doing the same. The valuation will only rise in time. If you expect Twitter to pay off from the sales perspective, don’t just tweet. Create a Twitter brand. The time is now!

Garment Valet – A Business Case Study

By Rob Walker (NYT)

The story of the young company is a reminder that entrepreneurship often depends more on successful execution than radical reinvention.

It’s easy to draw despondent conclusions from the economic headlines. For instance, if you were thinking of starting a laundry-and-dry-cleaning business that requires consumers to pay for the value and convenience of an efficient pickup and delivery service, you might be skeptical. Aren’t people just beating their clothes on rocks down by the river these days?

The good news is that not everybody has that attitude. Dominic Coryell, a 23-year-old senior at Northeastern University, recently won a prize for collegiate entrepreneurs on the strength of a business he runs in Boston called Garment Valet. The proposition is basic enough: Customers use GarmentValet.com to arrange laundry and dry-cleaning pickups and deliveries that — thanks to arrangements with building owners and managers — don’t involve waiting around for the driver to show up. And it’s not a business plan; it’s a business, with 14 full-time employees and about $950,000 in revenue last year. Grim economy notwithstanding, Coryell says he believes the company will fare even better after he graduates next month.

The Global Student Entrepreneur Award, which Coryell won, comes with about $10,000 in cash and a variety of products and services donated by members of the sponsoring group, the Entrepreneurs Organization. Rooting for the abstract idea of the entrepreneur, whether a small-business owner or the hypothetical Next Bill Gates, is one of the great clichés of American politics and life. From consumers to politicians to whatever Joe the Plumber is supposed to be, everyone supports entrepreneurs. They’re pivotal figures who will get us out of this recession. Some observers suggest that the downturn is actually sparking entrepreneurship, as laid-off workers make a go of a variety of new small businesses.

Funny then that, as Coryell notes, “the thing about entrepreneurship is that nobody knows what it is.” To some, it means dreaming up a magic-bullet idea that becomes the next Google or Facebook (or at least shows enough potential to flip to a buyer like Google or Facebook). And then there are “the people who are more kind of operators at heart,” he says, “who get involved in the complexities of an operation.” He falls in the latter category; Garment Valet was not even his idea. Another Northeastern University student, Adam Jacknow, created it in the late 1990s, when he was an undergraduate. They met when Coryell applied to be a driver as a freshman, and he promptly ended up as the chief executive and owner of 49 percent of the business.

“What really got me involved was that everything I did there, there was a direct response,” Coryell says. “If I wanted to make a flier and see how many customers it would bring in, I could do that.” Such elementary experiments led to tinkering with the accounting, with sourcing strategies, with figuring out which marginal changes really improved profits and cash flow. Jacknow has focused more on proprietary software and other technology that improves efficiency and that he hopes will fuel more growth.

The story of the young company is a reminder that entrepreneurship often depends more on successful execution than radical reinvention. Originally focused on students, the business has shifted toward young professionals who now make up two-thirds of its customers; more recently, the company began deploying a “virtual concierge” system involving special lockers in some buildings so the exchanges can happen even in the absence of a doorman or building manager. Garment Valet offers a variety of pricing options to remain relatively competitive, but what it is really selling is the value of time saved.

The downturn has affected the business, most notably through tighter credit terms from lenders. So Coryell is focused on details, like how many active customers remain loyal, meaning that they use the service at least every 14 days. “From a sales perspective we’ve done nothing but grow, month by month, in this economy,” he says, estimating that the company is on track for $1.5 million in revenue this year.

He’s certainly aware that some might see a service like his as an easy expense to eliminate. “Now is the time to show people that you can kick service up and give them what they deserve,” he says. The next step is operating in a second city, by 2012, and slowly building a national brand. “The economy is what you make it,” he adds. Spoken like an entrepreneur — one with student loans to pay.

On The Net : Business Case Study

Six Traits That Separate the Achievers From the Wannabes

Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, a social entrepreneurship funder which has dispensed over $27M to projects such as City Year and Teach for America, says the people who make things happen share certain common traits.

Each year Echoing Green vets about 1000 ideas to come up with 15 projects they want to fund. The trick, Dorsey says, is ferreting out which of those submissions is not just a scalable idea, but has a person behind it with the right stuff to make it happen.

“There’s truly magic to doing this work,” she said. “You’ve got to find the right person, with the right idea, who can execute, and who’s at the right moment in time for idea to take flight.”

To separate the worthy from the wannabes, Echoing Green canvassed the characteristics of more than 500 Echoing Green fellows. They distilled them and put them together into something they call the social entrepreneurship intelligence–with a nod to Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (EQ).

Running out of time, Dorsey listed six:

1. Core identity formation and alignment. “These folks,” she said, “have reached a level of authenticity in life. They have found purpose and passion. They know what they’re on earth to do. They’re in the Social Change ‘zone.’ They have head/heart alignment.”

2. Focused and ability to execute with alacrity. “It’s not enough to have an idea. You must be able to prove your model is having an impact and build on it.”

3. Solutions oriented.

4. Asset based thinking. “Most of us deficit based thinkers,” Dorsey said. “But instead of seeing the world as filled with problems, they see opportunities. They see the glass as half full, and execute against all odds.”

5. Resource magnet. They’re able to draw money, garner human capital, and attract media attention.

6. Deep and unshakable commitment to a cause.

On The Net : Fast Company

Twitter is all over the Internet. It could be well taken for granted as media and marketing hype. But, I strongly believe in its communication potential. And to me, that is the single most value factor which will propel Twitter into directions we can hardly foresee at the moment.

I rarely endorse a company or a project without my humble due diligence. Twitter is one of those companies, which will change the way we interact and conduct business.

Below is a Business Week article on how small and medium sized businesses use Twitter to gain customers, make sales and and build upon their business with minimal investment.

On The Net : Tweet your way to business success.

The original article is filed below, in case the article is deleted in the future.

Twitter: Building Businesses Tweet by Tweet

Entrepreneurs are finding the fast-rising microblogging site to be a useful tool for reaching out to customers

By Jeremy Quittner

Here’s what happened when Chris Savage, the chief executive of Wistia.com, searched for the phrase “private video sharing” on Twitter, a social networking site. One post he found read, “A teacher requested a private ‘video sharing’ Web site so that specialists can observe student behavior—can anyone refer one?”

That got Savage’s attention. He e-mailed back: “Still looking for a private video sharing site?”

Minutes later came the reply: “YES! It’s the first request for one—thought I’d hit up my tweets before [I] go digging.”

Savage: “Cool. You may want to check out Wistia.com. Full disclosure, I’m the CEO; -)”

While this exchange may seem a bit cryptic, Savage is one of a growing number of business owners to whom it makes an awful lot of sense. Savage frequently trolls Twitter looking for sales leads for his five-person, $1 million company, which makes software that facilitates video sharing through a private network. Although Savage has been using Twitter for only a year, it’s already helped him find 12 new clients for his Lexington (Mass.) company. “This is a no-cost way of marketing,” he says. Because Twitter provides a public forum, each post becomes a form of promotion as other users follow Savage’s posts. “You are building a reputation; people can go back and look at your Web site and the quality of your content, and you are becoming part of the community,” Savage says. Other business owners are using Twitter for market research and to keep an eye on customer service issues.

BREVITY’S BRAWN

Twitter distinguishes itself from MySpace (NWS) and Facebook by relying less on picture-laden profiles and more on posts of fewer than 140 characters, referred to as “tweets” or “microblogs.” Twitter’s simplicity is paired with a powerful search function that allows users to mine others’ updates in real time for useful nuggets. “Twitter lets you stay on top of what is happening within your client base,” says Chip Lambert, owner of Network2Networth, a business development consultancy in Phoenix. “You can look at conversations and reposition yourself, your products, and your services in a way that appeals to the market you are reaching out to.”

An estimated 5 million people use Twitter, according to Cambridge-based Forrester Research. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says businesses “that are not quite big enough to make an impact on the Web, or to spend resources there,” have been some of the earliest users of the site. He says some San Francisco-based coffee shops and bakeries have sent tweets to tell their customers about specials or products they may be out of that day. One Los Angeles taco truck uses Twitter to tell customers where it will be that day. “Businesses use this as a hybrid between marketing and customer service,” says Stone. “They use the Twitter Search to track mentions of their products and services and as a way to begin a conversation.”

Like any online forum, Twitter may not be for everyone. Its immediacy and conversational nature make it a boon to those whose products and services may take a bit more explaining or back-and-forth. And it can be a time suck. “One of the major drawbacks is that [Twitter] is very addictive,” says Savage, who has 800 followers and in turn follows just as many. He uses a popular add-on called Tweet Deck, which lets members organize messages by category.

GETTING STARTED

Joining Twitter is easy and free. You create a user name and password, then log onto the site. (You can also sign up to have tweets delivered to your mobile phone.) Once inside, there’s a big box at the top labeled “What are you doing?” While you could start by typing something as mundane as “I am drinking my coffee and checking out Twitter,” you’ll see tabs on the right that say “following,” “followers,” and “updates,” enabling you to follow others whose posts you find interesting. Once you’ve been posting for a while, people follow you too. A certain viral element takes over, and soon you may wind up in the middle of a Twitter community with common interests.

You’ll also find thousands of irrelevant posts. “It is easy to get lost and sidetracked,” says Lambert, who suggests entrepreneurs think strategically about how they might use Twitter. A mortgage broker, for example, could follow discussions people are having about new tax credits, learn what advice they’re getting and which sites they’re linking to, and then compose a suitable message to address them.

The viral component of Twitter has helped Andra Watkins, founder of Positus, a consulting firm based in Charleston, S.C. She joined Twitter about six months ago, and at first found it a bit daunting. “I did not grow up using these tools and it has taken me time to develop the voice and approach,” she says. Still, she has built a following of 600 Twitterers—friends, colleagues, bloggers, and potential customers. She in turn follows about 600 other people, including a group from her home state of South Carolina—85% of whom she figures could help bring in business. She also follows influential bloggers and those with large Twitter followings, in hopes of establishing a dialogue with them, and keeps tabs on her competitors. Watkins sometimes sends out tweets that have nothing to do with her business, such as a few complaining about exercise. “It makes me more approachable,” Watkins says. In the past six months, she’s found 10 new paying clients through Twitter.

Other business owners, like Michael Coffey, chief executive of BlueCotton in Bowling Green, Ky., are using Twitter to enhance customer service. The 25-employee, $4 million company lets customers design their own shirts online. For the past two months, two of Coffey’s factory workers have used iPhones to snap pictures of completed shirts, and then to send photo tweets to customers right before shipping. “Customers have some anxiety when they purchase shirts online,” Coffey says. The tweets help alleviate those concerns—and have won new customers who spot the designs on Twitter. “Having people follow BlueCotton is a feather in our cap,” Coffey says. “It helps create real fans of the company.”