Top Companies Don’t Know How to Sell

Weird things are happening in the world of sales these days. A recent list of the top selling products ever, includes Star Wars, Harry Potter, Mario Games, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the Toyota Corolla. 40 million sold.

Weird that only one of these seems to require a well organized salesforce in the traditional sense, Toyota.

The 450 million Harry Potter books were sold by a single, modest, shy lady who was living on unemployment benefit, and picking potential customers (editors) on the basis that their names sounded like characters in her stories.

It worked !

Then along comes the respectable Advertising Age (Sept ’13) and pronounces that the bright sparks at Toyota have launched a campaign that provides a “textbook case in mistakes to avoid.”

So are there any rules in sales ?

The Toyota sales gurus are criticized because:-

1. They say their product is “cool” and “with it“. You can’t do that. Only others can say that of your product.
2. They (their engineers) say lots of new features make it great. You can’t say that either. Just because you like your super new features, all that matters is what the customer thinks.

3. They say they used in-depth research. Trouble is they drew conclusions that made no sense. Just because old people are shorter than average, and drink lots of tea, doesn’t make tea drinking a cause of shrinkage !!

So, how about we travel back in time to 1904, when the earliest record of the AIDA model was scratched on a piece of parchment, and filed for posterity.

If you can create ‘awareness‘, ‘interest‘, ‘desire‘, and ‘action‘ in your audience, you’re clearly home and dry, right ?

Today Twitter can generate awareness faster than carrier pigeon, but because that’s true for all of today’s selling efforts, the challenge to be creative and impactful remains the same.

Today Facebook ‘word of mouth’, and endless freemium offers can generate interest, but too much of it is really really NOT interesting after 10 seconds.

Today the transparency of Crowd Sourcing (baaaaa — sheep noise) behind online celebs can give rise to desire (even lust !) for your product, but in a digital world, everyone is a celebrity (or expensive) for 15 minutes, so its hard to sustain desire !

Luckily today “action”, especially ‘buying action’ is possible in so many new ways (web, mobile, paypal, ebay, bit coin) 24/7, by nearly the entire planet’s population, maybe that’s where the focus of sales should be?

That’s certainly why we invented the HAX Growth program for early stage ventures.

Certainly action sells better than words !

Originally published at sosv.com on March 11, 2014.