Seth Godin on good salespeople and great salespeople. The best sales managers know in their guts this is good advice. They just don’t have the stomach for it.
“The great ones reach out. They work the phones when they’re not first in line. They understand what a customer wants. They’re not just better than good. They’re playing a totally different game.
My best advice: Fire half your sales force. Then, give the remainder, the top people, a big raise, and use the money left over to steal the best salespeople you can find from other industries or even from your competition. You’ll end up with fewer salespeople. But all of them will be great.
And the good guys? Have them go work for the competition.”
Good Will Hunting is ten years old, but this scene seems as fresh as today’s news:
NSA Guy: The question isn’t… why should you work for the NSA… the question is…why shouldn’t you?
Will Hunting: Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? That’s a tough one. But I’ll take a shot.
Say I’m working at the NSA and somebody puts a code on my desk. Something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it.
I’m real happy with myself because I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East and once they had that location they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding… fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with get killed.
Now the politicians are saying, oh, send in the Marines to secure the area ’cause they don’t give a damn…it won’t be their kid over there getting shot, just like it wasn’t them when their number got called cause they were off on a tour in the National Guard.
It’ll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass who comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job ’cause they’ll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks.
Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price and of course the oil companies use a little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon.
They’re taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course maybe they even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fucking play slalom with the ice bergs.
It ain’t too long till he hits one…spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic .
So now my buddy’s out of work, he can’t afford to drive, so he’s walking fucking job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids, and meanwhile he starving ’cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only Blue Plate Special they’re serving is North Atlantic Scrod with Quaker State.
So what did I think?
I’m holding out for something better.
I figure while I’m at it… why not shoot my buddy…take his job…give it to his sworn enemy…hike up gas prices…bomb a village…club a baby seal… hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard. I can be elected president.
What is really amazing to me is that gasoline today –at my local pump– is very close to $2.50/gallon. Nothing close to that when GWH was filmed, let alone written. Interesting, no? If I could ask Matt Damon and Ben Affleck just one question, it would be… tell me how you came to write that scene.
Seth Godin explains two of the biggest benefits of blogging:
“The act of writing a blog changes people, especially business people. The first thing it does is change posture. Once you realize that no one HAS to read your blog, that you can’t MAKE them read your blog, you approach writing with humility and view readers with gratitude. The second thing it does is force you to be clear. If you write something that’s confusing or in shorthand, you fail.
Respectful and clear. That’s a lot to get out of something that doesn’t take much time.”
I’ve been dealing with clients and customers for 35 years and there’s no question that the past five years of blogging has made me better at it.
Steve Outing posts an insightful look into the future of news that contains this gem from his interview with Robin Sloan, manager of new media strategy for Al Gore’s Current TV.
“I think ‘news’ just becomes a less distinct category. You don’t sit down with a newspaper, or even a news website, or even a super wireless e-paper device, for 10 minutes in the morning to very formally ‘get your news.’ Rather, you get all sorts of news and information — from the personal to the professional to the political — throughout the day, in little bits and bursts, via many different media. With any luck, in 5-10 years the word ‘news’ will be sort of confusing: Don’t you just mean ‘life’?”
Anyone that reads the news, produces the news, or is in anyway involved with the news should read Outing’s article. [via Terry Heaton]
Seth Goden defines “sheepwalking” as: “…the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line.”
