Selling cars like selling B2B?

car-guyAt the end of 2013, NPR program This American Life ran a show  called Cars that followed the inside life of a new car dealer. It focused on their specific challenge of meeting a monthly quota by whatever means necessary.

We aren’t as intense on the quotas, I think, but all the drama kept reminding me of B2B sales. The all important deal-tracking board, the sales that fall thru, salespeople who are golden (or suck), managers managing (good or bad).  And the families who live with the demands of sales, too.

It was an episode of ‘This American Life’ that did exactly what their name says, capture a slice of American Life, our collective lives.

The Jedi cloud-storage solution

Kind of my first attempt at ‘cloud storage’ for my team about three years ago:

  1. Buy a domain & get unlimited hosting at Bluehost.com.
  2. Set FTP paths to sub-directories set at 755 (so visible path/nav to browsers).
  3. Show staff how to quickly upload via Filezilla.
  4. Give links to sub-directories to sales team within their current online sources.

But I’m not going to upload any HTML, so what do I do with the ‘home page’? This still cracks me up:

Selling 'The Swing'…

How the customer explained itWe’ve all seen it before. It’s the cartoon where the the customer orders the swing and it starts something like this picture of “How the customer explained it”:

Of course, the order is doomed from the start. The internal process is going to wreck it.

Back somewhere in this blog I posted this cartoon after much Googling, but can’t find the post now. Well now you can create your own at Project Cartoon (thanks LifeHack.org). Use the pictures you want and create your own captions with a slick Ajax tool.

Sample cartoon
Make your own cartoon

Its a uniquely B2B joke that we now can make the most of. Bookmark it!