Let me tell you a story about the most powerful tool in sales.
A few decades ago, a 27-year-old, shiny, new Xerox sales representative was minted. Already a sales veteran, it wasn’t his first rodeo. Indeed, he worked his way through college selling on commission.
Commissioned salespeople, like entrepreneurs, work the marketplace high wire. Observing this act, a salaried employee once remarked that selling on commission was “living by your wits.” In the vernacular, business-to-business sales professionals know “you eat what you kill.”
Pre-Xerox, this salesman received rubber-meets-the-road sales training from the small business owner who gave him his first commissioned job, followed by a multi-year stint with Sears, where more sophisticated sales training was acquired. And finally, he survived the rigorous hiring process and completed the Xerox Professional Selling Skills program. PSS was globally recognized as the sales training gold standard, and any Xeroid of that era will tell you of its positive professional influence on the rest of your life.
With the ink barely dry on his PSS certificate, our young Xerox salesman made one of his first calls on the local installation of a national firm. He was now a fully converted, Kool-Aid-drinking disciple of Xerox sales fundamentals, and his head was packed with product, pricing and probes. Unfortunately, as he sat in front of Mr. Keener, the plant accountant, all of the professional probing techniques and listening skills our sales executive had learned and practiced were no match for the cargo of content he dumped right there on Mr. Keener’s desk, like a truckload of, well, you know.
When you take a photograph, the resulting product is two-dimensional: tall, wide, and flat. But in most cases, you want the photo to actually show depth, where images in the foreground and background are all in focus.