Tag: sales

First Order of Business

There was the time I was supposed to book my first order. I was 23 years old and working for Motorola at the time. It was supposed to be a simple thing, just needing me to drive to an account, hand over a quote and get a purchase order for some MOSFETs. This was the perfect way to get a sales engineer, fresh out of training, an easy win.

This is how it went. I drove my company car over to a small power supply company in Branford, Connecticut. It was the first time I had ever been on a sales call alone, and I wore a suit and tie. I think I carried a Samsonite briefcase with me. Inside that briefcase was a folder with one piece of paper in it which was the quote necessary to book the order for the semiconductors we were selling. All I had to do was hand the buyer the paper, and then he would give me an order for the parts in question. Easy.

The buyer’s name was John, he was a big burly guy in his late 40’s. He’d worked there most of his career, and he stalked around the building like he owned the place. John met me in the lobby, shook my hand, and then escorted me through a maze of cubes to his office near the factory floor. This was one of those places that had caution signs posted in hallways and mirrors high up on the walls so you could see if a cart was barreling toward you. OSHA would have been proud.

John sat me down in a chair across from his desk and eyed me carefully.

“Where’s the quote?”

I pulled the paper from my briefcase and handed it to him. He looked at it for a moment, grunted, and then reached around his desk to some shelves where he pulled out a thick, bound computer printout. As a quick aside, I should point out that this was 1986, so there was very little (if any) “looking things up” on a computer screen. In fact, I do not think there was even a keyboard in his office. John opened the printout and began thumbing through it, running his finger down a column until he came to a part number. He took out a red pen and drew a line under the device name and extended the line across the page. He grunted again.

“You’re too high. I need you to do better.” He said, leaning across the marked up list.

This was not going according to plan. John was supposed to thank me and give me a P.O. I had no idea how to lower a price, or even if I could. So I sat there just looking at him. Some sales guy I was.

John said, “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. I just looked it up. Your competitor is cheaper. You think about a better price. If you give me that price, you get the order. Tell me when I get back.”

And he left, leaving the printout with its big red line and, what I now knew was my competitor’s price, open on his desk. All I had to do was get up and take a look. He was practically telling me to do so.

But I’m stubborn. I sat there, not moving, wondering how it could fall to me to screw up something so easy. John came back.

“Well?”

“Well…” I said. “That’s my best price. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to lower it.”

John closed the printout and folded his hands on top of it, and looked at me the way a parent looks at a recalcitrant child. He was, in fact, old enough to be my Dad.

“Carl, look up above my head at the pillar in the corner. What do you see?”

I looked up. Attached to the pillar was one of those curved mirrors giving a wide-angle view of the hallway and, of John and I seated in his office.

“I see a mirror.”

“Yes sir, you do,” he said. “If you go down that hall a little bit and stand near the coffee pot, you can see right in here. I watched you. I do this a lot. You never looked at the printout I left open. Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I think I was sulking a bit. It would have been easy to have read the book. “I guess I felt like that would have been cheating.”

John went on to tell me, to my surprise, that I was the first person he had done this with who had not looked at the book.

Now, you may be thinking that this is where the story has a happy ending. The gruff purchasing manager, seeing the integrity of the young, inexperienced salesperson, gives him the order anyway. The lesson being that honesty gets rewarded. That is not what happened, and that is not the lesson. Texas Instruments booked my first order that day because they had a better price. Why? Because John was true to himself too; over time, I came to know that about him. John was a wonderful guy and a great teacher.

This was the start of a successful long-term relationship between John and I. Relationship leads to trust leads to business. That cycle takes patience, but when given the time to develop, it is the bedrock of real, sustained growth. John and I respected each other. That was worth far more over time than the momentary purchase order I had just lost. I had gone in thinking that the order was all that mattered and left empty-handed but full of thoughts.

No looking for “sales” became my secret to successful sales. If revenues are the thing that one measures success by, then, there is this: before my 38th birthday, I turned that understanding into over $1B in orders. Revenue, purchase orders, money, etc. are distractions that hide a simple underlying truth: the first order of business is always people, and the first order of people is a relationship.

That’s a good lesson to lose an order on.

How To Buy A Great Peach

The Peachoid in Gaffney, South Carolina

Since I’ve gone to Carolina in my mind these past few weeks, here is a lesson I learned at a fruit stand about the countless satisfactions that come from engaging in the process of buying and selling something from another person. Oh, and, this story also has great peaches in it.

South Carolina Grows the Best Peaches

There is a small town named Moncks Corner (the “Moncks” is pronounced just like the robe dwelling brothers you might find in a monastery) snugged up between Lake Moultrie and the Francis Marion Forest in South Carolina. Even though it is a tiny place, it merits its own exit off of I-95, and it was that exit my wife and I took on our way back from Charleston one humid August afternoon. We made a small circle in a parking lot to a pop-up stand selling peaches.

Now, I’m here to officially announce that South Carolina grows the world’s best peaches. Everyone knows it, even those usurpers to the south who go so far as to put a peach on their license plates. The watery, string-fleshed stone fruit from the other guys cannot begin to compare to the subtle, sweet-juiced terroir of the one-true-peach from South Carolina. These peaches are meant to be eaten from the brown paper bag you bought them in, held gently between index finger and thumb, a napkin wrapping the back half as you bite into them; or without the paper holder, stooped, so the juice doesn’t stain your front. South Carolina peaches are multi-sensory things: eating one requires looking and leaning and slurping, and maybe humming a joyous little tune at the same time. A Georgia peach demands no such honor, its only ceremony coming from the sound of a can opener and the ooze of corn syrup as its flesh is poured into a jello mold.

The Proper Way to Buy a Peach

Peach season is so hallowed in South Carolina that the buying and gifting of the fruit during harvest is as necessary as a plate of cookies are at Christmastime. So there my wife and I were, eyeing the beautifully boxed rows of Carolina sunrises, lightly touching, smelling and picking up peaches as carefully as a sommelier would choose a wine, when up pulled a car. It was a Cadillac with tinted windows, and New Jersey plates. Out stepped a woman leaving the car running, and driver’s door open. She grabbed a paper bag and began cramming peaches into it. The way we were all watching her, you might have thought she was throwing live puppies into the sack. Having amassed a bag full of bruised fruit, she handed them to the man standing by a cash box and said, “These are Georgia peaches, right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

A minute later, the change handed over, she was back in her car and off north on 95. Yankees… they miss out on so much by being in such a hurry.

My wife, a South Carolina native, handed over our bags. Her accent always becomes just a little thicker, either when she’s on the phone with her Mama or, as was now the case when talking with one of her countrymen.

“These aren’t Georgia peaches, are they,” she said. It was not a question, but instead, a drawled out observation.

“No, ma’am. Picked ‘em this morning about two miles up the road.” He was smiling.

“Thank goodness,” she said. “If they weren’t from South Carolina we wouldn’t buy them.” And then they were both smiling. He could tell from her accent that she was a local. The way she inspected the produce and handled it showed respect. In the style of these things, they had formed a relationship. They knew each other. I suspect that a merchant selling spices in a stall in Morocco a thousand years ago would not have seen anything new in that umbrella-covered stand that day.

The money changed hands, and I noticed the peaches cost less for my wife than the woman in the Cadillac. Then we were off too, carrying our precious cargo back to friends and relatives.

Transactions vs. Sales

This whole process from peach to purchase was an essential counterpoint to in-vogue postmodern business wisdom. First, the farmer intuitively knew the difference between a transaction and a sale. The interaction with the woman from New Jersey? All transaction. Everything about her, from the idling car with an open door, to the haphazard bagging of the peaches, said she cared only about speed. She didn’t care about the product or the price. It wasn’t even clear she knew how far away she was from the Georgia border. As far as any of us could tell, she wanted Georgia peaches NOW, and that is what she bought. She was a McKinsey consultant’s dream client. The transaction was swift and efficient; highly quantifiable. It was a profitable sale. Could it be even better? Seeing the transaction and not the people makes it disturbingly easy.

A consultant from Bain might look around and offer a helpful Pareto chart of how the fruit stand could be faster, and handle even more volume. There would inevitably be a suggestion to move the fruit closer to the highway. Perhaps have hanging bags of peaches and a drive-through lane so patrons could just roll down a window, get their fruit without stopping, and pay electronically. With a transaction mindset, growth is always the goal. Hyper-growth with speed is better. According to everything preached in “best business practices” now, this would all be considered “good.” Notice though, the thing slowing everything down, messing up all that efficiency? People.

Contrast transactional business with the sale of peaches to my wife. The farmer knew his customer. She knew the farmer. They shared a state of mind; a sensibility. Heck, it was South Carolina, they were probably even distant cousins. The entire conversation between them was a relationship that had a thread of trust running through it. Counter-intuitively, that trust came with a discount. The process was slow. The bills were crumpled, and we were fishing for pennies in a change purse. Pennies! The very inefficiency of those little slugs of copper was a testament to the farmer’s lack of “business agility.” In the end, the farmer even received less revenue by his own choice! By everything that we read in the Harvard Business Review, this process would be considered “bad.” Damningly, the entire sale might be labeled “inefficient.” And yet, there was a deep, immeasurable satisfaction to the whole experience; it was unquestionably, “right.”

Where Did All the People Go?

Sales is always a subject. A transaction is an object. Transactions are things counted; they are atomized, devoid of the essence of human interaction. Frustratingly, “transactions” are all anyone in business wants to talk about anymore. Transactions are significant little numbers in spreadsheet cells, walled off from the ephemera of needs and pennies and fruit flies. Transactions are things to accelerate, to synchronize to arbitrary dates, to graph. The human piece, the heartbeat that quickens the entire enterprise? It seems these days to be too messy to measure. How does a farmer accelerate the ripening of a peach? Fruit cannot be harvested on arbitrary dates. People are unkempt, and out of control, so it is perhaps not surprising someone would try to get them out of the system. Yet everything a business does relies on one person buying and one person selling. No matter how hard we try to get rid of that inconvenient fact, it will always be true.

I sit in board meetings these days and listen to all the talk of scale, users, clicks, shareholder value and speed, speed, speed. I wonder: what happened to the people? In business’ zeal to find units of measure and then show them as beautiful asymptotes of growth, did we lose the soul of what is and always will be, a human enterprise? Trust cannot be measured, so we do not seek its pulse. “Relationship” does not graph nicely on PowerPoint, so we stop trying to foster it. Businesses now prefer words like transformation, disruption, and disintermediation and work very, very hard to take humans out of buying and selling. The self-referential business is “in,” and the human-facing company is tres passé. Just because it cannot (or should not) be measured does not mean it is not essential. We mistake the absence of a measure as if the thing has no meaning, and in so doing, attempt to build businesses without actual people in them. Only much later do we run a survey on our company and wonder why our employees feel disenfranchised, cynical, and powerless. Of course, the forgotten feel that way.

Here’s the thing, and it is so pervasively embedded in being a human it is overlooked. Buying, selling–the interpersonal exchange of goods, services, and ideas is one of the condicio sine qua non human experiences; it is an indispensable and essential activity that helps define personhood. If you think this may be a bridge too far, try to go a day without engaging in either buying or selling. Try to go even an hour without. If you’ve gotten this far in the essay, you’ve just spent (spent!) 15 minutes being sold on an idea. This is why the entire concept of a transaction based business should be anathema to us; it says our personhood has no value. Business needs to get back to the essential truth: it is there for people, not the other way around.

Because the people are there waiting, just hidden in plain sight, doing their lovely, crazy human thing. We know them by the way they’re cradling a bag of peaches all the way to the kitchen counter. People are the ones slicing just-picked fruit over ice cream on a hot August night, while fireflies dance above the front lawn. Humans are the ones that marvel at the taste of something that defies all measurement.