“Michael always says K.I.S.S. — keep it simple, stupid. Great advice. Hurts my feelings every time.”
— Dwight Schrute, Dunder Mifflin Inc.
There’s an episode of The Office where Dwight, the top salesman for the Scranton branch of the failing paper company Dunder Mifflin, takes out Ryan “The Temp” for his first sales call.
Except, they don’t go to straight to the sales call. Instead, Dwight takes Ryan to a beet farm for a kind of bizarre hazing ritual, involving a beet seed, a wheelchair, and a wrestling match with Dwight’s cousin Mose.
Not very useful.
And neither is the sales advice that Dwight gives to Ryan when the hazing is over:
“Ask a lot of questions that all have positive answers.”
Sure enough, Ryan takes this advice and bombs during the sales call. The clients even personally tell him they don’t like him. The only thing that’s left for the two Dunder Mifflin salesmen to do is to throw eggs at the client’s corporate headquarters and go get drunk.
So what’s a better alternative to asking yes-seeking questions such as “Couldn’t your company use a stronger, lighter, cheaper stock of paper?”
I can personally think of four different strategies, each of which would probably work better than the questionable yes-seeking sales advice that Ryan got.
I’ll go over each of these four approaches in separate posts over the next few days.
For now, just a quick public service announcement:
I’m almost finished with my “How to become a $150/hr, top-rated sales copywriter on Upwork” book. Once it’s done, it will go up on Amazon, and will even be available for free during a short promo period. If you want to get notified when this happens, head over to the page below and plant your beet seed over there: