SchwartzBlog

Over the past few days in my internship, I have been listening on quite a few sales calls. I’ll go into a few details. The company I work for has a few categories. These include student engagement software as well as leadership seminars and training. In the past few months, they have been very focused on the technology aspect of the company, and recently they have decided to ramp up the leadership training part of the company. To do so, we needed to reconnect with all the people who had brought this company in before and had not had a chance to bring us in again. So in short, I have been listening in on quite a few sales calls in the past few days.

One of the biggest things I noticed didn’t have to do with the business part, but the personal part. Whenever Tom started or ended a call, he always kept a personal element. When I read Made To Stick, they referenced a similar aspect.

Think about this: More people will donate money to a single child in Africa than the number of people who will donate to a cause for an entire African country. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, because obviously an entire country is more important than the a single person. And yet, facts are facts. When people see that one child, they no longer are thinking logically, they are thinking with their emotions. People act differently when thinking emotionally. Emotions drive people to acting in a way they would never act when thinking logically. So when we get people to connect on an emotional level, they are much more likely to care and, more importantly, remember.

Start-up type businesses are all about making themselves stick. When it comes to higher education and especially corporations, The people you contact within each organization have a lot on their plate. Therefore, in an initial sales call your goal is not to sell your product, but to make yourself stick. In our case, we want our prospective customers to know that Swift Kick is personable, innovative, and, well, cool.

When you talk to someone about your product, it sticks to you. You know all about your product so when you talk about it you can think about your product from every aspect. But when I talk about leadership training, most of you won’t know exactly what leadership training is. You will know that we are training people to become leaders, but probably not much more than that.

So when I talk to customers, I can’t just talk about the product, because it won’t stick with the customer. “Innovative” will stick. “Cool” will stick. When you think of “cool”, something comes to mind. When you refer to something as cool, you link it to something else you already know. In other words, it sticks.

My goal is to make myself stick. So the next time I call and say “Hey it’s Andrew from Swiftkick”, people don’t say “Who?” If they have related me to other things in their mind, they will know who I am. I will be (to a certain extent) emotionally connected with them. And, with that, I can start to sell a product.

When you make yourself stick, you greaten your chances of success. That’s a life lesson right there.