Business Strategy — Stories:  Value selling. #Sales #Marketing

The story’s genesis:

I used to tell this story when I was trying to help some of my colleagues, who were very high net worth individuals when it came to technology but below the poverty line when it came to marketing & sales and putting themselves in the Customer’s shoes. 

 

They were not “dumb.”  Far, far from it; they were some of the smartest people I’ve known.  They just never thought about things from a different perspective.

The story:

Imagine it’s 1920 in a small town in Western Maryland, Frederick.  Frederick was home for generations of my ancestors dating back to the Revolutionary War.  My mother Jane was born in 1920.  Her house was downtown, only a couple of blocks from the courthouse, hospital, and Hood College.  When it was built, it had a room for a fully equipped bathroom, but Frederick didn’t yet have sanitary sewers.  So, for the 1^st few years of Mom’s childhood, it was the outhouse in the lower backyard.

Imagine the telephone company salesperson knocking on the door of her house and trying to sell telephone service to my Grandma Irene, then in her 20’s.  (The salesperson I identified as Harry Brandt.  Harry was a real C&P Telephone Company person in Frederick but actually a technician who mentored my father in the late 1940’s.  My brother’s middle name is Brandt.)

Did Harry talk to Grandma about the carbon block lightning arrestor they’d install in the basement?  The wizardry of the telephone set?  Or the inside wire, open wire, and pulp insulated cable connecting the home on West Fifth Street to the central office on East Patrick Street?  Or the manual switchboard?  Even though you and I know all this stuff is required for telephone service and you and I find it fascinating, I doubt Harry mentioned any of it.

I bet the dialogue went something like:

Harry:  Mrs. Esterly, I’d like to talk to you about telephone service.  When you’re getting low on coal for the furnace, what do you do? 

Grandma:  Well, my husband Russell walks to the coal yard and places an order. 

Harry:  I bet that’s no fun on a busy and cold and rainy winter day.  The coal yard has telephone service and if you did too, you could just call them with your order.

Harry:  How about groceries?

Grandma:  I walk to the store and give them my order and they deliver what we need.

Harry:  The grocery store just got a phone and uses it to take orders.  A telephone would save you a trip.

And, what I imagine to be the clincher … Harry appealing to a new mother’s anxiety and fears (aka the good old FUD gambit).

Harry:  How about when your baby come down ill in the night and need a doctor right away?

Grandma:   My husband Russell or I walk to Dr. Jones’ house and wake him.  (The Dr. Jones character is real too; he delivered my mother, at home.)

Harry:  Dr. Jones has a phone too, both at his office and at his home.  He can get to you a lot faster that way.

Perhaps as testimony to my adolescent sense of humor, the story still amuses me.  I like to think it helped a few people with a new paradigm.