Art of the Soft Sell...

Its been awhile since I last posted but I've just been real busy at work and then too tired at home to even turn on my machine. After a long day of configuring some gear, my boss went across the street to 7-11 to pick up some congratulatory beers. Beer never tasted so good and who knew our local 7-11 would carry Yeungling?!?! The post work beer talk started off on our plans for the rest of the systems, but then my boss started to talk about his past lives as a salesman and PM. His theories and I guess you can call them mantras were actually pretty interesting. His last job was with the nuclear industry and rather than go after his customers with a hard sell approach, they didn't sell at all. His company actually took a year off from cold sales and any other opportunities and concentrated on forming a new plan. They called it the Mercedes Benz plan. Rather than push and push to stress how their energy solutions would solve people's problems they went to the soft sell. They would present their solutions to people in terms of what it could do, but rather than line em up for the last push, they would offerto evaluate the potential customer to see if their infrastructure and cash flow of the company would basically be "worthy" enough to purchase their services. How brilliant is that??? Make people question their own value and sense of worth to think that they needed to buy your product. Of course it works with cars and beer and clothes, but who knew you could make it work with nuclear power??? That what he wants to do with our new system. Not push people and bad mouth the competition, but make people feel insecure about their processes and procedures tot eh point where they are demanding our product. Its like trying to make legalized crack. Other than the long hours, I think I may enjoy working for this guy.

Oh I almost forgot...on my way home last night I got a call from my boss giving me a pat on my back for the work I put in this week. The best part was that he told me that once phase one of this project is over, he wants to hand it off to me so he can go back to what he likes, the selling...Do I want to manage again? Maybe, maybe not...we'll see.