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Business Rule #44:
Plan Your Work and
Work Your Plan
February 28, 2006
(PAGE 2 of 2)
Summer liked boasting about her product knowledge but wasn’t able to step outside her comfort zone to use it to sell to other restaurant owners. If she had just stuck with it for as long as fifteen to twenty minutes, chances are she would have developed an approach that would have made calling easier and more successful.
My first job doing outside sales was selling ads for a business newspaper. Typically, I visited six small business owners each day. I had no idea that selling intangibles, like ad space, was harder than selling hard goods. Good thing, too. I’m not sure I would have sold a series of six half-page ads on only my second day in the field if I’d known it was supposed to be difficult.
Back then, all I knew was that I would never make a deal if I didn’t first make my pitch. My plan was to make my six sales calls in person every day, and I did it. Sometimes the first few minutes were awkward. But if I got past that, I really enjoyed having a chance to speak with someone I might not have met otherwise. My best advice for better success at cold calling is to have fun chatting with new people and treat it like a game. Contest for the rudest hang up, anyone?
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The Gold Rush team lost. Understandable, as they didn’t have much of a plan. Giving away tote bags, without letting consumers know that a freebie was going to be available, didn’t offer any incentive to get people into the store. If Gold Rush had limited the giveaway to people signing up or upgrading their memberships, the tote bags might have at least encouraged people to buy. But they just gave them away. Just handing them out to the first 400 people who came in, without any advance promotion, was hardly the best use of their budget.
Unfortunately, the Gold Rush team didn’t even work the plan that they had. As George Ross pointed out in the boardroom, Summer just needed to have made a few successful calls to have changed the outcome. It was that close.
Summer’s biggest mistake though was interrupting Donald Trump in the boardroom. Not only did she tick him off, but she also stopped him from attacking Tarek. Any first-year law student knows better than to interrupt the Judge. Don’t be rude to the one person who has the power to determine who wins and who loses. I know Summer felt an irresistible urge to bare her soul and be “honest.” What she truly revealed though was a lack of impulse control. Not a desirable personality trait in a business manager. Trump fired her on the spot.
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I would never make a deal if I didn’t first make my pitch.
