The Rosewood Blog

Isn’t it interesting how we assign meaning to different colors? Certain colors are associated with certain emotions:

     I’m feeling blue today. 

     He was green with envy. 

     She was wearing a happy yellow sweater.

Some colors are considered warm colors (reds, oranges, and yellows—think sun and fire), while others are called cool colors (greens, blues, and purples—think plants and water).

There are good ways to get people talking about your business. And then there are not-so-good ways.

The story of a unique Hoover vacuum cleaner promotion gives us one of those not-so-good ways: create an outrageously generous offer . . . that you can’t afford.

Unfortunately, the sales profession has a poor reputation. In Gallup’s annual Honesty and Ethics survey, car salespeople rank second to last (just above lobbyists). But it’s not just car salespeople that have a problem—salespeople overall have the reputation of being dishonest and pushy.

Regardless of the overall perception of salespeople, you, as an individual salesperson, can break the “sleazy salesman” and “pushy salesman” stereotypes that are so common. 

Have you ever become frustrated trying to extract a product from its plastic shroud? Or maybe you’ve even gotten hurt, jabbing yourself with scissors or slicing your finger with a knife trying to open a plastic package. 

You see them everywhere—people engaging with their mobile phones, swiping, tapping, talking, watching, listening.

Who makes all those phones–millions and millions of them? Today Apple and Samsung are the world’s two biggest phone manufacturers, but fifteen years ago Blackberrys were all the rage. A BlackBerry phone had a physical keyboard with tiny buttons for typing, and the phone allowed users to send and receive both calls and emails.

How many ads do you think you see in a day? Some people estimate that an average consumer is exposed to thousands of ads daily. This is especially true for people who use the internet, where ads show up nearly everywhere. This ad-saturated environment might be a little like driving down a highway lined with billboards, one standing right beside the next for miles. You would soon simply ignore them. 

Elizabeth Holmes had a brilliant product—new technology that would change blood testing. No more needles. No more drawing vials of blood at the doctor’s office. In 2014, Business Insider described the vision of Holmes’s company Theranos this way:

“You might be able to walk into a Walgreens pharmacy for a reportedly painless fingerprick that will draw just a tiny drop of blood . . . The company can run hundreds of tests on a drop of blood far more quickly than could be done with whole vials in the past — and it costs a lot less.”

Garrett clung desperately to the cold steel platform of his tree stand, his feet dangling high above the forest floor. It was October 23, 2008, just four days before Garrett and Cheryl’s third wedding anniversary. Garrett’s life flashed through his mind. He saw Amber in her high chair at dinner last evening—her charming ice cream face. He imagined Cheryl’s widowed future . . . 

For the last fifteen minutes, Garrett had struggled futilely to wrap his legs around the tree trunk. He yelled one more time, even though he knew no one was close enough to hear. He felt the air chill as the sun sank behind the mountain. 

In 1855 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

Over the years this has been boiled down to this pithy statement: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”

This seems like a simple formula (better product = sales success), but you can probably identify what is missing: how is the world going to find out about the better mousetrap? We could revise that formula this way…