Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Love What You Sell

First, a true story about company loyalty on steroids. My father was a hard-working Coca-Cola salesman. No matter the weather—rain, shine, snow, sleet, or hail—he drove the roads of Maine every day to deliver his heavy cases of soda. He, like all Coke salesmen (sorry, there were no Coke saleswomen back then), loved the company and product. He loved it to the point that if he came to your house and saw Pepsi in your fridge, he would pour it out and replace it with Coke (free of charge).

The rivalry between Coke and Pepsi salesmen was real—they loved their own company and hated the other. Let me tell you a true, slightly intense, company loyalty story. One time, the company that made their coolers—the ones they put in the stores with their logo all over them—mistakenly delivered a Pepsi cooler to the Coke plant where my father worked. What do you think they did? Of course, they should have called the company and asked them to replace the cooler with the right one, right? But did they do that? No, they did not.

Here’s what they did. They loaded up the cooler on a Coke truck and took it to one of their houses. They filled with it with ice and beer. They drank all the beer and took sledge hammers to the cooler, destroying it. Then—this is the best part—they dropped it off in front of the Pepsi plant filled with empty cans of Coke. Now, that’s being loyal to your company!

There is one more story about my father and his loyalty to the Coca-Cola Company that demonstrates he did have a sense of humor after all. Later in his career, he showed up to a family Halloween party dressed in a Pepsi uniform carrying a six pack of Pepsi! He quickly became the hit of the party.

How about you? Do you feel you are selling the best product on the market today? Are you so proud of what you sell that you brag about it to everyone you know? Are you so confident that your products are the best product on the market that you make it your mission to make sure everyone buys it who needs it? Do you feel sorry for those poor customers who don’t take advantage of your product and all the benefits that come with it?

To be a successful salesperson, you must feel like you’re doing your customers a favor by giving them the opportunity to buy your products. You want to tell as many people as possible about the great solutions your products offer to solve their problems.

The next best thing is getting your customers as excited as you are about your products. Enthusiasm is contagious, and the more enthusiastic you are, the more enthusiastic your customers will be.

If you have the right sales job—when you believe in your company and its products—you’re going to jump out of bed in the morning so you can talk to as many people as possible and convert them to the products you’re selling.

The true job of a salesperson is to get the customer off the fence and onto your side of that fence. The best way to do this is to demonstrate the true value of your product. If all the customer wants to talk about is price, then you have not done your job properly. You must convince your customer that your product is so valuable that they will want to pay what you have convinced them the price should be.

A perfect example of a valuable product is college. People feel that a good college education is so valuable to their children that they will pay any price. Think about that for a minute. The price of a Harvard education of now a quarter of a million dollars. People are breaking their backs to get in and Harvard only admits one out of five applicants. Now that is perceived value!

That’s exactly what we have to do with our products—raise the perceived value so high that our customers will feel guilty even haggling about the price. To do this, you must love your products—love them as much as my dad, the Coke man, loved his.

It’s only common sense.