Liars

A reprise. But it's so relevant again.

Sir Alan Sugar, star of The Apprentice, used to start each show with the line "I don't like liars, I don't like schmoozers, I don't like bullsh**ers".

The four candidates left after yesterday's semi-final prove that actually he does. All four embody those qualities, as do many of those who were fired, they were positively praised after spouting the same ego-babble in their interviews.

But I fully admit, those three qualities should really help you to be a good salesman of tat, maybe that's what Sir Alan is actually looking for, though I suggest that other qualities are more important to be a good manager of people.

Sold Out

I said yesterday that people who are not directly in sales tend to be in jobs where the percentage of successful transactions is higher. Another way to put it is to say that, at least in choice of career, we are more risk averse.

And as it's Friday, I may risk a verse.

Sorry, that pun was a crime.

So I'll resist this time.

But next week the gags will be worse.

Death of a Salesman

The main "point" of yesterday's post was derision at the pathetic BBC attempts to maintain "balance" by bringing in prejudiced self-interested salesmanship, but there was casual personal line thrown in at the end. So perhaps a little aside about the nature of salesmanship. It's personal again, look away now if you are not interested, or if you are easily sickened by shameless self-promotion.

Much of this blog is inevitably a sales pitch for myself. Somehow I claim genuine expertise and experience in a strange combination of data analysis, customer insight, problem solving, financial transaction processing, project management, data modelling, systems architecture, information warehouse, application design, direct marketing, internet technology, marketing infrastructure, campaign management, etc. But even more strangely, I genuinely like it too.

But, and this is not good for the personal sales pitch, I do not like sales work, at least the low level petty transactions such as those of weekly Apprentice tasks. One reason I've mentioned, that short term tasks encourage dishonesty. But a second reason - it comes down to percentages. In our line of work, most of the time we must succeed, otherwise we'd be sacked. Most of our interactions with other people have a positive outcome, they keep the operations flowing or move the project forward. By contrast, in most sales jobs, most of your individual interactions do not have a "successful" outcome, if you judge "success" as most sales managers seem to. We can look at the bigger picture of building up brand image, but only a small percentage of salesman interactions result in an immediate sale.

So basically we all like to win, and we choose the environments where we are most likely to win.

Consumer driven sales Ikea style

An article in today's Financial Times connected the new consumer driven internet with a big blue and yellow Swedish furniture store. As the thing that connected them was alleged to be web 2.0 and the new world of consumer driven marketing, and as that is the core of my work, and as I despise the Ikea sales model, this note was inevitable.

Ikea is great at marketing. The vision that they sell is one that the FT suggested was like the consumer driven web because they provide a user-defined flexibility and customisation that is very different from the old model of the store. They make the buyer do the work in order to provide a richer more flexible more tailored shopping experience.

But the reality is not so great. Ikea does make customers do much of the "sales" work, that much is true, but they actually sell very narrowly defined visions. They are encouraging particular designs, colour schemes and combinations - as the show rooms that line the tortuous paths through the store will demonstrate to anyone. The store is the antithesis of Google, it is deliberately slow and awkward to find a specific product quickly. Even the catalogues promote particular cohesive styles - selected sofas, shelves, rugs etc together form a specific "dream" to which specific target groups will aspire - they do not give quick answers to consumer questions.

I'd suggest that small niche suppliers (or even Argos) are closer to the pure web 2.0 business model and are much closer to the Peppers ideals for consumer driven marketing. The new world was supposed to provide more choice, more vision, more speed and more convenience than the old world. Ikea makes decisions easy for those who lack imagination while complicating the sale for those who lack time.

But the Ikea marketing sells the dream not the reality. I hate it. But it is genius.