Ecolutionary Selling

Which product would you want to sell?

To create a can of Coke, at one time the company used 70 liters of water for every one liter of Coke. It’s down from that 70 liter high, but still far more than Soda Stream which uses one liter of water for one liter of soda with no can to recycle or plastic bottle leaching BPA into your child — all at 1/4 the cost.

If you were a Mother pinching pennies with little time for waste or recycling, which would you pick? Maybe that’s why Soda Stream’s stock is on the rise…

Under full disclosure, I bought a Soda Stream for the above reasons and haven’t looked back, not because I’m a Mom, but because I wanted less waste, recycling and sugar in my body.  It’s one of those products that you wonder how you managed without one before.

If you have to choose between working at a company with good PR or one with a solid, green product, follow the product.

Wouldn’t you like to have a business with the level of sales that this group represents?  They are working to insure that the dream can still happen for start ups and legacy companies. They are the white hats to the black hats of business, working in tandem to solve their own legacy issues while creating a sustainable business model.

Their business plan-of-action leads off with this dire alarm:

“…the energy challenge is much worse than most people realize. The problem is already imposing a heavy burden on our nation—a burden that will become even more costly. The economic, national security, environmental and climate costs of our current energy system will condemn our children to a seriously constrained future unless America makes significant changes to current policies and trends.”

Download the business plan here:  American Energy Innovation

What is becoming abundantly clear is that the only role Congress will be playing in this economic transition, will be of blessing the solution that business comes up with. With this group leading instead of BP and their cronies, I have hope for a greener future with sustainable practices.

They represent a cross section of industries that deeply affect the business to business economy at large. Download the plan now, and learn what you need to do to join them at their table.

I like this blog post on “Who do you trust with your data, Google or Apple”?  I took the poll and found that I was in the majority, Do-No-Evil-Google, wins.

Is that because Google’s been in the info-biz and Apple is in the product biz? We expect and have given over our info to Google because we know that it is the trade off if we want information on the other side. Apple, however sold us an info distribution product. They have no right to collect information to use only to their advantage. They can and are, but that doesn’t make it right.

It made me think about how this applies to our open source world; when is data-gathering ok and when will it bite you in the market share?

With Search a good sales rep can learn everything about a prospect before meeting with them. You could probably even put together an entire proposal before you sit down, but is that smart?  Doing so is an invasion of their intellectual privacy.  No one likes to know that you know more about them than they know themselves.

Lesson learned: let your prospect put the polish on the proposal. Don’t be an Apple.

At Best Buy, they know that the more women they have on the sales floor, the higher the sales per store. What generic characteristics do women have that men don’t which can make them naturally more effective?

Neuromarketing ran a post a while back on how something as simple as a smile can increase sales. Which gender smiles more, males or females?  You don’t need to do any reaserach other than a lifetime of experience to know that answer.

Today they posted on How to Soften Up Your Prospects. The general wisdom is that if you place customers in a hard chair, they’ll negotiate less and you’ll get a better and higher level sale.

Research has found the opposite to be true. The more compfortatble the client, the more likely the sale will go in your direction. The coorelation goes as far to say that if the tactile cues before a sale are soft vs. edgy… the sale will go more smoothly in your direction. Which gender has softer items on and around them — males or females? Which gender tends to be more welcoming and warm?

The article takeaways:

• Seat them in a soft chair.
• If you hand them anything, avoid hard objects.
• ….described in Heat Up Sales – With Coffee! (not coincidentally, based on research by John Bargh), offer them a warm beverage.

The takeaway for Sales Directors — embrace soft skills, social settings and your feminine side.

“Consumers want to buy brands that are good for them but also good for others.”

DUHHHHH. When did consumers want to buy brands that aren’t good for them or others? How many moms do you know that want to buy toxic formulated products that will damage their pets and their crawling babies?

Now that the tide is tipping towards real, boardroom-born sustainability vs. the eco-lite  that comes our of a marketing department, companies need to tune up their sales voices as well.

The above quote came out of the recent MIT Sloan Winter Research Report is just plain insulting on so many levels:

1. (again) Duhhh, tell us something we don’t know.
2. If you knew this, then what took you so long?
3. If the consumers want this and sparked the idea, then HAIL THE CONSUMER or GROUP that helped push you to a higher benchmark.

If you give credit where credit is due, that group is going to feel really good about their efforts and push your product around and continue to support your company. They felt heard and respected. At that point you’ve created a partnership that you can build on.

Typically what happens, however, is that a mom’s or advocacy group works for decades to get the “problem” recognized and acted upon. At the point where the company can’t take the public pressure, they change their ways. BUT THEN, rather than thanking those who were part of the bigger picture, they ignor them and claim that it was “the company” who came up with the idea, not those who are are trying to sell to. That’s just so pre-Internet thinking.

Think about how well that goes over in your internal business operations. Someone comes up with an idea and offers it around and after ignoring the contributor, the boss picks up the idea, claims it as his own and takes all the credit for thinking of it. How supportive would you feel for the boss after that? How many more ideas will you contribute?

In this new market where the buyer/seller equation is very public, it’s time to own up and respect the consumer. They are doing their part to help move sustainable thinking along and deserve to be recognized for their half of the work.

It’s good enough for corporate security.  Go ahead and borrow from this slideshow that provides the U.S. Army’s guidelines for how you can be all that you can be without giving away secrets that will keep you safe holding a gun or a keyboard.

What’s worse than being a foregone conclusion? Knowing the foregone conclusion yet not acting on it fast enough to take the market leadership position.

Check the picture below up close by linking here and then read the book - The Gort Cloud. I’ll meet you on the other side of the “oh-I-get-it-now” moment. It’s time to turn green into the new work “force.”