The Customer is Not a Moron

Published: Wed, 04/27/22

April 27, 2022

Good morning. For you, it’s probably a week like any other. But for us, it's a week filled with excitement and (some) nervousness, because this week we’re launching our referral program! Now, you’ll have the opportunity to get cool stuff for every person you send our way. Simply share your unique link (it’s in the last section) with the other salespeople in your life, and every time one of them subscribes to The Quota, you’ll get credit toward one of our rewards! Hey, it’s easier than chasing prospects… Now, let’s get into the newsletter.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

The percentage of sellers who say they have lost or delayed at least one deal in the past year because a stakeholder had changed jobs.

Source: LinkedIn State of Sales Report

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

A 92-year-old car salesman from New Jersey is still going strong, and as of now, has no plans to retire. Dick Shore, of Englewood, started selling cars in 1960 after getting his foot in the door as a mechanic. The veteran salesman still works five or six days a week, and his grandchildren say that he loves talking about his work at family functions. You can read about Dick and watch the short video here.
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, the duo behind the 1997 classic Good Will Hunting, are reuniting once again to tell the story of Sonny Vaccaro, the real-life sneaker salesman who signed Michael Jordan to his first endorsement deal with Nike back in the 1980s. Damon is set to play Vaccaro, while Affleck will play Nike CEO and founder Phil Knight. Damon is set to direct the film, which has no official release date. You can read more about it here.

FEATURE

The Customer Is Not a Moron, She's Your Wife: The Story of David Ogilvy

"THE PERFECT AGA SALESMAN COMBINES THE TENACITY OF THE BULLDOG WITH THE MANNERS OF THE SPANIEL." – David Ogilvy

There are good reasons why David Ogilvy has been called the Father of Advertising, though telling a housewife she can roast a goose in the middle of the night with her new cookstove if she so desires probably isn’t one of those reasons. This is just one of the many pearls of wisdom found in his sales manual, “The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker,” which Fortune magazine called “the best sales manual ever written.”

Ogilvy had many different jobs, only some of which were in sales, before founding his company Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather in New York in 1948 – a company that still exists today as Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Inc., operating in over 100 countries worldwide. Sometime between being thrown out of Oxford in 1931, apprenticing as a chef at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, attending secret spy camp in Canada, and farming with the Amish in Pennsylvania, Ogilvy found himself selling cooking stoves door-to-door in his native England. Using what he had learned on the job, he penned the famous sales manual mentioned above, which got him a job as a copywriter at Mather and Crowther in London, the advertising agency where his older brother worked, and the most British-sounding company that‘s ever existed.

Ogilvy believed that the more you know about your consumer, the better your advertising will be (he would have loved internet cookies). He was firmly against any kind of advertising that condescended to its consumers or patronized them in any way. He believed prospects were to be treated as intelligent and worthy of respect. That’s why, in 1955, he coined the phrase: "The customer is not a moron, she's your wife.”

Some other quotes from his sales manual include:

Laugh till you cry every time the prospect makes a joke about [the product].
The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore.
Never mistake the quantity of calls for quality of salesmanship.

When Ogilvy finally did start his own advertising agency in New York in 1948 (with backing from Mather and Crowther), he struggled to get clients. He attempted to attract attention by doing ads with celebrities, in particular, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who did his commercial for Good Luck Margarine in 1959, George Wrangel as "The man in the Hathaway shirt," and Commander Edward Whitehead as “the man from Schweppes.” Ogilvy would later admit that using celebrities who were irrelevant to the products he was selling was a mistake.

In running his agency, Ogilvy maintained four principles:

Creative brilliance: “Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, rebels, and dissenters.”
Research: "I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance."
Results: "In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create."
Discipline: “Successful advertising sells the product without drawing attention to itself. It rivets the consumer's attention on the product.”

Soon high-end clients were banging down his door. He created successful campaigns for Shell Oil, Sunoco, Dove soap, Sears Roebuck, Merrill Lynch, Pepperidge Farm, and, perhaps most famously, Rolls-Royce. In 1962, Time referred to him as "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry."

Perhaps it was Ogilvy’s quintessentially British manners that made him such a circumspect and serious salesman, subsequently putting him at the forefront of a 20th-century advertising revolution. His candor, discipline, and propriety were what endeared him both to his colleagues and to those reading his copy. “The trouble with most advertising is it tries too damned hard to be entertaining,” Ogilvy told The Times in 1971. With this year’s Super Bowl commercials still fresh in our minds, it’s difficult to disagree with the Father of Advertising. “Sooner or later,” he said, “it will have to be brought under control, probably by the government, for the sake of the immortal soul, the consumer.”

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

What percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs got their start in sales?

A. 8%
B. 47%
C. 26%
D. 15%

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

"I used to work at a call center in the mortgage industry. It was a combination of inbound and outbound prospecting, so we were expected to make a lot of outbound dials every day, even though our branch manager didn’t (usually) count calls or have a specific amount of calls that he wanted us to make.

Anyway, I sat next to this guy who absolutely hated the outbound side of things. He used to complain that he didn’t want to bother people, and that if they wanted to refinance, they could call in and do it. He only said this privately to me, of course, and he actually did close deals, but they were from inbound calls that we got, so he basically was able to fly under the radar because he was pretty smart and had a high close rate from inbound leads.

One day though, the branch manager decided to look at the volume of outbound calls we were making. Most people were averaging around seventy or eighty per day, but the guy who sat next to me was at like seven. In any case, the manager called him out in front of everyone, and said that he wanted the guy to call people until they either said yes or no, with no exceptions.

This guy was really pissed, but he knew he had to start making calls or this manager (who was pretty ruthless) would definitely fire him to make an example out of him, so he started making calls. When he finally got someone on the phone, I could hear him talking to them, and going back and forth a bit, because it sounded like the person was frustrated that they were being bothered at home by a telemarketing call.

But the guy who sat next to me wouldn’t give an inch, and finally, he said, “I’m going to keep calling you every single day until you either tell me yes or no, so which one is it gonna be?” The person hung up, but about twenty minutes later, the branch manager came out of his office and said that he’d just got a call from an angry customer, who said they were being harassed by a sales rep, and repeated what he’d told them (“I’m gonna keep calling you every single day, etc.”)

But not only was the manager not upset, he went up to the guy who sat next to me, put out his hand for a high-five, and said, “Nice job! That’s how you do it.”

That’s the kind of environment we worked in back then – those guys all thought they were in the movie Boiler Room. In any case, the guy who sat next to me quit a few weeks later. Last I heard, he sells for Oracle, and apparently does really well.

Anonymous Somewhere in New England

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram Poll -- April 2022

WORTH A PEEK

A good salesperson should, at best, love to negotiate, and, at worst, be confident in their ability to do so. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, by former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator Chris Voss, is a great guide to negotiating, covering the topic in an easy-to-understand format using nine effective principles. You can check the book out here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

Long time listener, first time caller here. I’ve been in sales for almost eight years, starting right out of college. Last year, I took a new job that bumped up my pay by almost 75% from what I was making before, but also bumped up my workload by about half.

I’m happy to make the money, but I think ever since I took this job, something has felt “off.” At first, I thought it was just the anxiety of getting used to working somewhere new, but in the last few months, I am starting to realize that I was a lot happier at my old job than I am here, despite the big pay bump.

At the old place, I had more work-life balance, I had better relationships with my coworkers, and I felt more comfortable with the overall sales process than I do here. The current job is super corporate, and it’s basically all-out stress Monday through Friday and on weekends too.

Just wanted to run this by others. Is this normal or am I an idiot for missing a job that paid me less money? I definitely went into sales to make bank, but I’m finding out that the way I truly feel is that it can’t only be about the money. What are your thoughts?

Unfulfilled in California

Dear Unfulfilled,

You’re not the first sales rep to assume the grass is greener on the other side, and you won’t be the last. More money is great, and for many people, it’s the only thing that matters. For you, that’s clearly not the case, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

It is our humble opinion that many sales reps view things a certain way because that’s how everyone around them views them. Meaning: those who value work-life balance or how well they get along with their coworkers might disregard these factors in favor of making more money because that’s the prevailing approach among many other (more vocal) people who work in sales.

It’s your life, and you’re not getting a do-over. You know the kind of life you want to lead much better than we do, and much better than whoever it was that convinced you that money is the only thing that matters in a job. So there’s probably a reason why you wrote in without asking any specific questions: you already know the answer yourself.

Quiz Answer: D – You can read the source article here.

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How did you like today's story?

Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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