sales & marketing

REALITY: People that want to negotiate your price are in reality negotiating your profit. Any time the word “negotiate” appears in a sales situation, it means both your price AND your profit are going down.

RETHINK NEGOTIATION: Where’s “value negotiation?” Where’s “customer profitability negotiation?” Where’s “customer productivity negotiation?” Where’s “customer improved morale negotiation?” Uh, they’re nowhere. That’s because negotiations in sales have “lower price and loss of profit to the seller” at their core.

The team at Facelift took a special ultra high resolution photograph at Vertikal Days this week.

I’m at London Gatwick Airport two hours before my flight home to Charlotte. I wandered into the Ted Baker store. I love Ted Baker clothing. I found a few things I liked, but they didn’t have one of the items I wanted in my size. I was assured I could get it online. Great! I completed my purchase, and went to the airline lounge to get on my computer and buy the other item. Easy online access, found what I wanted in less than a minute. But when I went to complete my purchase, I could not find the USA as one of the 40 or so “ship to” country options.

According to www.baseballreference.com, in the 135 years of Major League Baseball, there have been a total of 17,538 MLB players. Out of that 17,538, only 25 of them have hit more than 500 home runs. Of those 25, nearly half are contemporary players who may have used steroids, but the others are among baseball immortals: Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Mel Ott, Mickey Mantle, Eddie Matthews, Ernie Banks, Jimmy Foxx, Frank Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, Willie McCovey, Reggie Jackson, and Mike Schmidt.

Food for Thought is our way of sharing interesting concepts on corporate leadership and management with others who might find it useful. The thoughts offered are intended to be controversial and thought provoking. They always follow our motto of helping develop logical leadership.

A couple of our readers have sent us information and photographs of the new 3,600 tonne Sany SCC86000TM crawler crane. The crane looks like a combination of the Terex CC8800 Twin and Manitowoc’s model 31000. It uses a twin boom and twin derrick mast but employs four sets of tracks in a similar way to the Manitowoc. We are still lacking a great deal of detail, but some of the photos we have seen show a four tracked carriage which looks as though it might be a super-lift counterweight carrier.

I get a ton of emails asking to solve sales dilemmas. Here are a few that may relate to your job, your life, and (most important) your sales thought process right now:

Many, if not most, salespeople (not you of course) walk into a sale with product knowledge, a few questions, a sales pitch, and hope. This is a strategy that will result in “How much is it?” Bad strategy.

Some of Michigan’s numbers could knock you down: Nearly 2 ½ years of monthly double-digit unemployment figures Detroit, once proud of the nation’s highest per capita income, falls to No. 50. Two families leave the state for every family that moves in. Jim Chamness has decided that his Michigan company won’t stay down.

I have no business plan. I have no spreadsheet with five years of projected earnings. There are two reasons: Most business “plans” never come to fruition, and five-year sales projections are about as accurate as political polls.