For the love of selling

 

Question: Do you know why the mice cannot afford to throw big parties?

Answer: They don't sell enough tickets.

 

At the tender age of seven, I had my first itinerant selling experience.  This was during the long holiday.The product was old newspapers. The business owner was my Grandma and I was the vendor. I remember the joy I felt when she finally bowed down to my unflinching demand to go out and sell. She had a house-help whose mandate it was to sell these items. I didn't have to go out but I wasn't going to take no for answer. In this blog post, I hope to share my thoughts on marketing and how selling skills remain a priority skill in the wake of the robotic age.

I grew up in a family where both Dad and Mom were bootstrapping entrepreneurs. In those days, my Mom woke up in the early mornings to mix and knead flour and other materials necessary to make snacks. She had a bicycle-boy whose job it was to sell the items. She also had a restaurant where the rest of the items were displayed in the snack box.  On-top of owning a restaurant (my younger sister and I also had the good fortune of managing the restaurant whenever she was away), my Mom was a General Contractor. She supplied curtains and all sorts to institutions. My Dad, a high school English teacher resigned to join an agro-allied company that was involved in Cocoa processing and export. He is a man given to the field. He resigned later to start his own thing. As an Horticulturist, my Dad was so gifted that he could create a landscape architectural image of a virgin land with accurate dimensions. This was when 3D software like Auto Card e.t.c didn't exist as it were. To his credit, my Dad has created dozens of Gardens. My Mom continues to cater for events.

 

 

Marketing according to my Business Management lecturer during my A Levels is defined as "a creative management function which involves creating awareness about the existence of a product or service with a view of attracting patronage". This definition as you can tell has pretty much sticked. In my opinion, this definition represents the very essence of marketing. Pay attention to the keywords; CREATIVE, AWARENESS & PATRONAGE. I reckon that today, the greatest challenge for marketers is the need to cut through the clutter to reach the consumers. According to Seth Godin, (Author, Permission Marketing) as the world becomes increasingly noisy, the ultimate challenge is for marketers to tap into  ingenious depths to create a new way to pass their message.



The era of interruption marketing is dead and long gone. The objective of marketing is to first and foremost create awareness about the existence of a company, its service or product. In the new paradigm shift, this is even more crucial. There is a lot of advert contesting for attention. The other day I was driving home, I saw for the umpteenth time stationed trucks with dynamic advert flexes and changing banner parked at very strategic locations along the highly traffic prone area of Lagos. Such daring move is a testimony to the unrelenting desire to get consumer's attention. Attention span today is increasingly slow and getting attention is indeed a pre-cursor to making a sale. I like the way Seth Godin likens marketing to the dating game. Its one of the same thing. The idea is to get someone to choose you.

 

Today, the best brands are those who understand the changing trend in customer behaviour and the new rules of engagement. Times are changing and the war between brands continue to deepen. Organisations are not sparing dollars and cents to command attention. Advertising agencies no longer enjoy uninterrupted reigns over accounts as clients continue to demand more. Loyalty today is a conditional allegiance. On the client side, most consumers won't mind if 70% of the brands cease to be. Talk of the downsides of the choice economy. So if consumers are weary of being constantly bombarded by advertising and would indeed prefer to have less noise, what is the wise thing to do? My suggestion is to embrace minimalism all the way because less is more. This is the age of permission marketing.

 

Off the curve, the dynamics of competition is equally shifting. The population of my country is accelerating and by 2025, the population of Lagos is tipped to be over 20 million. At a current population of 175 million, decreasing oil revenue and continuous dependence on oil and gas, what will happen in the next 10 years in Nigeria? Are we going to become like China?



Let us imagine we continue to grow at the current growth rate with continued dependence on oil, I foresee a situation where competition will become so ripe that concepts like federal character will disappear. In that future, with increased literacy, qualifications will become mere commodities. When this happen job candidates will need more than technical competencies to prevail. That is when the plus factor will have to come to bear. The current knowledge economy driven by Industrial Internet rests on a crucial skill; Coding. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter e.t.c thrive on brilliant codes and algorithms. Suffice to say the wealth of the most valuable companies in the world runs on code. In the nearest future, we will experience increase in student enrolment in programming fields. It will be a matter of time before that skill becomes commoditized. When that happens, we will have to leverage on the most important skill of all; Selling.

 

I conclude by sharing the secret of what made Apple's iPod become such a huge lifestyle product. The technology for digital media player wasn't created by Apple. It was invented by  a British Inventor; Kane Kramer. In fact, iPod was not the first portable digital music device. Yet, when you talk about Top Of The Mind Awareness (TOMA) for digital players, iPod has no competition. Between, have you seen Microsoft's Zune? This device has got superb reviews that  compares favourably with iPod but it doesn't command similar attention. The secret of iPod's success is the marketing message. When Steve Jobs and the Apple team sold the iPod to us, they didn't brag about its RAM size. The pitch was "1000 songs in your pocket".



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