Experiencing…Selling (by Pedro Talaia)
Last week in Sales, the whole class was divided into 5 groups. We were challenged to go to the street to sell “Galos de Barcelos” for the duration of an hour.
Each of us had 15 minutes to define a marketing strategy and to try to sell more and get more money than the other groups.
We all knew immediately that this was a B2C strategy and that in order to get more and more we would need to use a Push strategy. But my group would like to go further and not to just sell a “Galo” based on a Push strategy.
So what made us different than the rest of the strategies?
First of all, do you know the “Galo de Barcelos” and the history behind it?
“Galos de Barcelos” is a non official Portuguese symbol that is known to bring good fortunate to the ones that have one.
To sum up really quickly the story about this myth is about a pilgrim that was in Barcelos and that was about to being executed. He then swore in front of the judge that the rooster that was cooked would sing when he would be hanged. In the time of the execution the rooster stood up and sang, fortunately the cord was not tighten and the pilgrim was not executed.
Since this is a symbol that everyone in Portugal knows, everyone sold it to people in the street by arguing that having one “Galo de Barcelos” would bring good fortune to the game Portugal vs Wales.
This is where the things get tricky; while everyone was trying to sell a amulet we tried a more subtle approach.
The main idea was to go to the local stores and to sell it and by exchange we would put photography of the owner with the rooster in our Facebook page (1,6k likes), supporting, not only, the Skills Lab team but also Portugal. Thus, creating empathy with the owner and bringing them together with our initiative.
The main idea was to get a pushy tactic into a pull one with a simple photography.
This was our technique to get more people engaged. The metrics are easy, we visited 25 stores and 20 of them bought one rooster. We barely had the need to leave the perimeter of the building where we started, since we’ve only walked 300 meters in opposition with some groups that walked a couple of kilometers.
In the end we were not the winners, we sold more but for the minimum price. Sometimes, you just need to be pushy and to get tough. The group that won sold less by a higher price and used the same argument as the others, and they only choose people/stores that appeared to have more money to spend.
But the main conclusion that we got from this, is that sometimes you just need to add a little thing extra in order to create empathy to get to someone.
