Victory
via VHS
From
keynote speech to laser lights, technique and technology fused to
find a remotivated, rededicated, and re-energized sales force charging
out of the ballroom into a bright, shining world where never is heard
a discouraging word, and everybody is a winner all the time.
How could it be otherwise?
The rented videotape, featuring a famous football star, promised it
would be: "Keep up that can-do attitude, team! Charge that line! Flatten
your competition. Go for the goal and win, win, win!"
Inspirational credibility
(and tape rentals) were later compromised when this world-class muscle
was arrested for beating his mistress while enjoying a controlled
substance.
Sales Meeting insertion
of coaches and quarterbacks has been done so long, and so often, it's
become institutionalized. And nothing, be it steroid loading, gambling
raps, public urinalysis, or renegade racism seems to suppress our
urgent need to move the locker room into the meeting room.
Citius,
Altius, Not-So-Fortius
Sales meetings (and those
who write them) are never permitted to consider the possibility that
sales people are ever tired, discouraged, or uncertain. All reps are
admonished to become relentless reservoirs of enthusiasm, commitment,
and triumph. To support this directive, billions of dollars have gone
(are going) into films, videotapes, and speeches designed to immunize
them from such tedious concerns as doubt, hesitation, or fear.
A case in point: Every
few years, Go For the Gold! is robotically resuscitated as a meeting
theme. Millions of dollars are then hurled at presentations designed
to convince sales people to emulate the qualities shown by Olympic
medalists.
A grand idea: Were it not
for the fact that most of the Olympic performances we admire are produced
by insular mavericks. Dissident loners who sweat it out for years
under conditions of fiscal deprivation and personal sacrifice no sales
rep in the world would tolerate for 30 seconds! Hardly congenial examples
to support those consecrated doctrines of teamwork and togetherness
so fervently invoked during executive keynotes.
Win,
or Else!
Myopic obsession with winning
exacts a price: It atrophies the psychic supports required to sustain
self-worth during the rejection episodes all sales people must deal
with.
When winning is the only
option sales reps are permitted to consider, failure becomes an abhorrent
personal malignancy: often perceived as a form of corporate sedition.
The transgressor is branded
unclean, unworthy, and unpromotable. Year-end bonus dollars, along
with company-paid Disneyland trips, vanish. The convicted party's
family slinks into seclusion as a scarlet F is sewn on their clothing.
Decontamination and status restoration can take years.
An
Idea Whose Time Should Never Have Arrived
Today's market fragmentation,
and lifestyle diversity, no longer justify the need for sales people
to be force-fed surrogate achievement stories. Invoking sales meeting
super-jocks is a vestige of our former obsession with mass marketing
by celebrity; being sustained by repetition, reason, and Michael Jordan.
If the only way you can
exemplify winning qualities is to employ paid testimonials—transparently
alien to selling, and patently impossible for your audience to attempt—then
you (and your company) have a problem.
Instead, try for something your sales force can identify with and
attempt.
If you can't find a good
internal achievement story to build on, try this one: "I'm going to
tell you how I lost one of the best accounts I ever had, and what
it took to get it back!" In the minds of your sales force, this will
qualify you for beatification: above and beyond even that given unto
Lou Holtz and Joe Montana. Amen.
John
Mackenzie is a writer and corporate
communications consultant who lives in New York City. Check out his
informative and fun web site at The
Writing Works.
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