Sales School

I've met people who can sell anything to anybody. I'm not one of those people. I'm a bad faker. I'm also highly skeptical -- which actually works to my advantage. It makes me my own toughest customer. If I can sell myself on something, then I know I won't have a problem with trying to sell someone else on it.

This approach to selling stems largely from having started a business on a small island. Nantucket is a tight-knit community. The people who live there are inclined to be critical of businesses. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing, so you've got to deliver quality products and services. If I make a mistake on Nantucket, or try to sell a lousy product or service, everybody will know about it.

More than selling a product, we're selling the process through which the product is made. This process manifests itself in what goes into our product, in how we present it, and in the story that emerges about our company. Our personality is also part of that process: My partner and I are just a couple of regular idiots who happen to run a company. People often ask me, "How do you sell to Generation X?" I don't know what Generation X is, but I assume that it includes people around my age (32). The best way to sell to anyone is to tell it like it is -- which sounds simple but which apparently isn't. For instance, look at the boys in Detroit. I'm always amazed by how they sell cars. Instead of grounding their sales pitch in the benefits of their cars, they talk about lifestyle and being cool -- or about limited-slip differential and rack-and-pinion steering. No one knows what those things mean! People know when they're being duped. So the best way to sell to them is not to try to dupe them.

Tom Scott (toms@juiceguys.com) and his partner, Tom First, started Nantucket Nectars in 1989. The company has grown from a 2,000-bottle operation into a $45 million company. Scott's favorite nectars are Pressed Apple and Authentic Lemonade.

Marilyn Carlson Nelson
Vice Chair, President, and CEO
Carlson Companies Inc.
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Anyone who views a sale as a transaction is going to be toast down the line. Selling is not about peddling a product. It's about wrapping that product in a service -- and about selling both the product and the service as an experience. That approach to selling helps create a vital element of the process: a relationship. In a world where things move at hyperspeed, what was relevant yesterday may not be relevant tomorrow. But one thing that endures is a dynamic relationship that is grounded in an experience that you've provided. That principle applies to any level of selling, down to selling your skills on the talent market.

To define "selling," the dictionary uses words like "influence," "induce," "impose," "dispose." The slang of selling even includes the word "dupe." But selling is really about proving that you're a good match for your customer and then backing up your claim with facts. You may be able to make a one-time sale because you care, or because you're persuasive, or because you're enthusiastic and persistent. But you can't build a long-term relationship that way.

Marilyn Carlson Nelson heads one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Carlson Companies owns a diversified group of service companies, including the Regent and Radisson hotel chains, Carlson Wagonlit, Radisson Seven Seas Cruise Lines, and T.G.I. Friday's. Together, these operations bring in more than $20 billion in revenues and employ more than 147,000 people.

Guy Kawasaki
CEO and Chairman
Garage.com
Palo Alto, California

It's simple: Sell to people who want your product; ignore those who don't. I spent years trying to get people to buy into Macintosh. We were selling a dream of how the world might become a better place. That kind of selling requires a different mind-set from that of trying to meet a quota. Some people got it in 30 seconds. Others didn't get it and never would. It took me a while to learn that you can't convert atheists. You can't sell oil to Arabs, or refrigerators to Eskimos. Don't even try.

Guy Kawasaki (kawasaki@garage.com) is Apple's former chief evangelist. Garage.com gets startups off the ground by matching entrepreneurs with investors. Kawasaki is also the author (with Michele Moreno) of "Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services" (HarperBusiness, forthcoming in February 1999).

Mark Bozzini
CEO
LinkExchange Inc.
San Francisco, California