Sunday, April 5, 2009

Cat Marketing


A cat strolls into a Cadillac dealership, walks up to a salesman and says:

Show me something that will make me purr.

Puzzling over this for a second, the salesman returns with a saucer of milk, placing it on the floor in front of the cat.

The cat takes one look at the milk, one look at the salesman and walks out.

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In polls of professions most disliked by the public, car salesman, and salesmen in general often rank highly. However honest an individual might be, they are dragged down by perceived untrustworthiness of their peers. In my experience the generalization is true.

Why is this the case? Why do ethics, honesty and fair dealing elude those in the selling side of business? Don't we all understand that business is selling, and that quality control in software development can equally be applied to sales staff?

This is an experiment I'd like to try: let's find one hundred sales people, from all types of business. We'd put them in a room of, say, twenty cats, and see how their sales pitches work.

This, another beauty of the cat, is that they know what they want, and what you think they want makes no difference...except over a long period of being together, when they trust and know you.

Imagine missing out being the person who sold the cat a Cadillac because you didn't listen.

2 comments:

DocAnnie said...

"A cat has absolute emotional honesty. Human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not." (Hemingway)

Sales person wastes valuable time not asking about and/or observing what kitty already knows she wants.

And in doing so, insults kitty.

Amazing how often this happens in sales/marketing transactions!

Tim said...

Nice quote, Doc, with the piquancy of truth. Good old Hemingway, blasting his way around Africa, shooting all in his path.

Interesting that he had such a soft spot for cats. I wonder what he thought about salesmen.