Always Be Closing
The movie Glengarry Glen Ross is a classic and its probably the best sales movie ever made. Some throw that accolade to Boiler Room, The Pursuit of Happyness or The Wolf of Wall Street. Others think about non-financial selling like fracking contracts in Promised Land, aluminum siding in Tin Men (my choice for runner-up sales movie),or the other classic “Everyman” salesman of Death of a Salesman. But the combination of the GGR cast (Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Alan Arkin), David Mamet’s writing and some of the most memorably delivered lines in any movie (most notably by Baldwin during his sales training) include the ABC (Always Be Closing) and AIDA (Attention, Interest, Decision, Action). Whether you are selling bonds, penny stocks, real estate, aluminum siding, fracking contracts, widgets, Fuller brushes or Bibles, the basic concepts of selling are the same. And its not that the ABC or AIDA process are wrong, but it’s the application of the process that matters. The ends justifying the means are the problem, and that makes the Alec Baldwin soliloquy the best recipe for how not to drive sales.
I have spent my life selling. Everything I’ve ever done seems to be about selling and it hasn’t seemed to end, even in retirement. The only common measure in selling is whether you get the order or not. Once you get the order, you can assess whether it was a good sale or a fraudulent sale, but without the sale, there is simply nothing to talk about. Selling without a sale at the end is just raw effort, its a good try perhaps, but it is not selling. There is an objectivity to selling that is unavoidable, and the most important and simultaneously the least respected role in any company is the management of sales. That is why sales managers turn over so often. Good salesmen don’t necessarily make for good sales managers. But without experience in selling it is damn hard for a sales manager to move the needle for the process. Sales is the heart of most businesses. It is the sine qua non of the business models and that means (literally) that without that there is nothing.
For me it all began when I was eight years old and living in Madison, Wisconsin. My mother was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin and we were making do with a $3,000 per year fellowship. That meant we had enough to rent a cracker box tract house. It was the kind of house you used to draw in Kindergarten, a peaked roof, a door and two windows, and, of course, a chimney (for the furnace since there was no fireplace). In retrospect I figure it was less than 1,000 sf for the four of us. Basically, there was no spare money for anything, especially not something as discretionary as child care or camp. Child care was left for my sisters (1.5 and 3 years older than me) and me to figure out for ourselves. That meant that we were on our own, as they say, every man and woman for themselves. I can point to certain lingering traits that were negative and positive about that early independence program.
And then there was camp, or the lack thereof. I remember my mother ranting about how awful it was that kids had the whole summer off to do God knows what. I think that was her subconscious way of saying she couldn’t afford to send me to camp, so I had better get real good at making gimp key rings at the local park. There was nothing in the world this eight-year-old wanted more in life than to go to the YMCA summer camp on Lake Mendota’s northwestern shore. It was my Elysian Fields, my Valhalla, my Walden Pond, but it cost an unremembered amount of money per week to cover the busing and the camp counselors (lunches were to be brought in brown bags from home). Whatever the amount, it was more than we could afford, and I completely understood that. I was very aware of the sacrifices my mother was making for all of us. After all, I was her bunk mate…literally. We shared a bunk bed in one of the two bedrooms.
But the YMCA had been helping disadvantaged young men (and women) for many years and they tended to do it while not losing the available teaching moments. In the case of summer camp, they had a program for aspiring campers to defray the cost of the minimal weekly camp dues by selling chocolate thin mints door-to-door. The sales incentive program was both a junior enterpriser program and a playing field leveler for the financially challenged. It was available to all, not just those in need. That meant that it was competitive and involved little or no boundaries as to where aspiring campers could sell their mints. It was geared to allow a solid sales performance to perhaps at best net a camper with gumption a free week of camp.
I wanted more than a week in Valhalla. I was relentless. I sold thin mints every day from the moment school ended until it was dark and beyond. One of the advantages of the unsupervised youth I was living was that my mother didn’t get home until late and I was on my own to heat up my Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pie for dinner at whatever time I chose. In those days, the southeast side of Madison around the area called Spring Harbor, was the quintessential post-war suburban sprawl, with modest homes built for the working and lower middle-class folks looking for their piece of the American Dream. Those neighborhoods went on forever and when they did end, they were adjacent to the next similar neighborhood. I pounded the pavement of all of those neighborhoods with two shopping pages worth of one dollar chocolate thin mint boxes. I don’t remember them being particularly heavy, but I do remember lugging them back and forth every day on foot.
The YMCA outsourced the distribution and collection task to the elementary school where I attended. That meant that my goal each day was to take two full bags and sell two full bags. Then the next morning I would reload and discharge my sales receipts. I would not stop the door-to-door program until I had sold my daily quota, whether the sun was still up or not. In fact, I learned that when it got late and I had only a few boxes left, I would get a pity sale from some housewife or some sympathetic husband who wished his kid had that much gumption. I used everything I had. My mother was going to school. I had no father. I wanted to go to camp. It was a bit pitiful, but it worked. I wore my regular school clothes, which in those days consisted of a pair of old khakis and a t-shirt. The t-shirt was always less than spic and span and the pants had been sewn and re-sewn (mostly by me since my sisters had their own needs to attend to), so they were a bit lumpy around the seams. I wasn’t winning any best-dressed awards in those days…nor did I care a whit.
I sold mints to everyone, including my teachers and even my principal. No other kid had thought to try that trick…and it worked. To them, I was a kid with a single mother in grad school and no father and I had just moved up from Costa Rica. I was as close to an unwashed but worthy immigrant as there was in Madison in those days. The bottom line was that I broke every mint sales record that the YMCA had. I earned a full eight week camp session, which was the full duration that the camp operated during the summer. I sold so many that they loaded me up with camp t-shirts and various passes for arts & crafts and such that cost a few extra pennies to partake of. I don’t know this, but if they are like all other sales organizations I have known, I probably forced them to revise their sales commission plan for the next year. It didn’t affect me since I was busy working a program to go to a sleep-away camp in northern Wisconsin for free. At that camp (Red Arrow), I even got my horseback riding lessons for free. What can I say…always be closing.