The true price of sales training

Studying sales and marketing is expensive.

It’s not the courses, seminars, conferences and other sales training that gets me; it’s the “live research” where I actively pay attention to the marketing around me.  Take yesterday for example.

The Art Gallery of Ontario called around dinnertime, where Kevin brought me up to date with some of the upcoming exhibitions.  And of course, the whole time, I’m waiting for the pitch for a donation to kick in, not because I’m cynical about telemarketing, but because that’s the natural flow to these kinds of things, or at least, to my mind, it should be (plus I’m on their donor list.)

Now, if he’d just hung up, the truth is that I would have been offended, or at least felt something was wrong.

So we ended up talking for about ten minutes in total, and on a lower level throughout the call I’m doing the math of how many connected calls they could do per hour without getting answering machines or hangups, and how much these ten minutes were costing them for staff and infrastructure, measured against my best guess of the average donation size.

And I’m also acutely aware of the fact that the longer you can keep a prospect engaged, the more likely you are to close a deal (fun fact: many marketers, online ones include, employ a bunch of psychological tricks to make you feel like more time has passed and your relationship is therefore deeper than it is.)

Which is how it happened that instead of outright turning Kevin down, I asked him to get back in touch before the end of the fundraising campaign, which wraps up early next year. Of course, I can rationalize that as more “free” training as I dissect the AGO’s methods further.  Seriously, Kevin did a great job, and the organization struck me as really polished and I’m proud of the work they do. See how I’m already talking myself into a yes?

I say all this not to make myself look like a generous patron of the arts, but to point out a side effect I’ve found after a several years of extensive sales training and research into the fields of marketing and persuasion: I’m incredibly susceptible to a well-delivered pitch.

Apparently I’m not alone: I can’t remember who said it, but I was watching a talk where someone pointed out that to reject good marketing is to tell yourself subconsciously that it doesn’t work, which in turn holds you back in your own efforts.

And yes, he was selling something at the end of the talk, but damned if it didn’t make for a great justification.

Photo by rejon