One summer evening while driving back home from work I experienced something that I had never ever experienced before.
I saw smoke coming out from under my car’s hood.
Mine was a 14 year old car but I prided myself on the regular maintenance that I performed on it. Maintenance that helped me put 158,000 miles on it without a problem.
But the car was gone now and I had to get another one fast.
I had always wanted an SUV,one with three rows and all wheel drive, and felt this was a good opportunity to buy one. I looked at the usual suspects. Used Hondas, Toyotas and Acuras. Why just the three makes, because those were the ones driven most often by members in my circle.
It was a frustrating experience. Because of the poor state of the economy there was more demand for used vehicles than new. All the ones I looked at were way above my budget. And I spent quite a bit of time on it.
Then one day, after three days of fruitless search I did something that I should have done at the beginning of the search. I did a Google search of all SUV models that came with three rows and had all wheel drive.
I saw eligible models that I had not even given a thought before. I was so trapped with the original list of three that I could not see beyond. I was blind.
Performing the Google search was the turning point in my personal car search. It immediately opened up more options and we snagged a car that met my requirements and my budget. Plus it is so much more appealing than the boring three.
Here is the moral of my story.
If you ever feel trapped then increase the number of options. If you ever feel overwhelmed by the number of options then reduce them.
I did both. When you enter the market for used cars you get thousands of options that can overwhelm you easily. I reduced the number by requiring the car to be an SUV, three row seating and all wheel drive.
When I felt trapped by the three makes I increased the number of options by looking beyond the three makes.
One time at work we all participated in an innovation campaign. As part of this campaign employees split up into separate teams of 12 to 13 people to come up with an innovative idea. Our mandate was to come up with a Powerpoint presentation of our idea and its applicability as well as a billboard with a catchy headline. The billboard would serve the purpose of advertising.
At the end of the campaign employees all over the company would review each presentation and vote on the best ones.
Very dutifully we came out with what we genuinely believed was a great idea. We spent the last few hours before the submission deadline prettying up the presentation by adding neat animation features, cute grahpics and sound effects!
Almost as an afterthought we spent the last few minutes as the team was breaking up discussing the need to make printouts of the billboard and put it up at key locations.
Looking back, this was a very useful exercise. We learnt a lot from it most of it after we were done with the actual work.
We observed colleagues doing some really innovative things. Some hung up their billboards from the ceilings, some on the covers of coffee cups. Some created lifelike dummies to drive home the message of their presentation. Some put up banners at key locations such as employee entrance into the campus. Many teams practiced email campaigns in which each team member sent out emails to his/her personal contact list urging them to check out their presentation and vote for it. This turned out to be particularly effective as many employees just did not take time out to reveiw the numerous presentations. So the first one that approached them ended up getting all their votes.
We had done none of the above. We fell into the very familiar trap “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your doorstep”. This story was a personal example of the need to sell even in areas you would never associate with selling.
What was galling was that I considered myself to be fairly marketing savvy!
In his book “Lets get real” Mahan Khalsa quotes “Sales is the second oldest profession in the world often confused with the oldest”.
We all know what the oldest profession is, right guys
His quote packs quite a bit of meaning. It reveals the hoary past of salesmanship and how integral it is to humanity. But it also shows that no matter how important it is, we look down on the people practicing it. I used to be one myself. I prided myself on my technical expertise and felt that sales was easy, not challening, not cerebral and certainly not fulfilling.
Once I understood the importance of sales I thought I had managed to become quite the sales savvy person. But as the story above proves we need to constantly be on alert lest we slip into our past conditioning.
