By Jim Lundy
The closing line of my presentation last night at the SV Marketing Forum was “sell me this pen.” It’s also the closing line in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s a great line, but many don’t know where it comes from. While The Wolf of Wall Street has reinvigorated the phrase, the phrase is no joke. “Sell me this pen” is exactly the technique I used when I was the District Manager of Sales at Xerox in Philadelphia. Last night I revealed that connection and today I made a short video blog that recaps some of it.
The biggest challenge that many enterprises face is the failure to integrate Sales and Marketing, and it is vital that these two areas work together in a synergistic manner. We often see a disconnect between these two areas and the issue has become a frequent topic of discussion. Fortunately, alignment can be achieved in many cases. When this happens, companies grow faster than firms who do not possess this alignment.
I spent a fair amount of time last night talking about Sales Methodologies, i.e. the craft of Selling. In many cases, a firm does not have a repeatable sales methodology in place. In other cases, a firm might have one in place, but if they do, it isn’t used consistently. At Aragon, we also spend a lot of time advising enterprises on what they need to do to scale. And when it comes to growth, Sales comes up more than not.
There are many other Sales and Marketing topics that we discussed last night and we were excited to receive such gracious thanks and applause after our presentation. I think it had a lot to do with being able to talk about the pain points of Sales (I’ve had experience in just about every sales role there is out there) and Marketing (again, we know from our experience from actually having these roles).
Aragon Research is going to be executing a repeat performance of my chat last night. In the meantime, you can download a copy of the slides here. And in the meantime, in preparation for your next presentation, you can practice by selling me your pen.