Salesmanship as an Art and a Science

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Your Company Name

Your company name had better be good, especially if it is a new company. It is your primary sales tool. It should be short, powerful, and have a lofty, service-oriented ring to it. A name that you can feel truly proud of.

A great company name, in my opinion, is ICon, the name of the computer service and Internet corporation with offices located in New York and New Jersey. At the time this book was written, my good friend Tom Livaccari was vice president of New Media for ICon and was serving on the advisory board of my own company. (Tom has since moved on to become director of sales and marketing for Dennis Interactive, one of the nation's leading Interactive software development companies and a subsidiary of Dennis Publishing, the largest independently owned publishing company in the United Kingdom. A master salesman, Tom will present his theories on the psychology of salesmanship in Chapter 11.)

Not only does the name ICon connote the "paragon of authority," it is also linked with one of the most visible and often-used symbols in software, that of the computer software program icon.

And there's a lot more going on in the ICon name, too. Remember that a few paragraphs before I said that all great business visionaries have tried to find a way to project their companies as having an aura of almost religious integrity and devotion to a cause.

Please do not underestimate the importance of having such an aura around your company.

Look, for example, at the definition of icon from the Random House Dictionary: "Icon N. 1.Eastern Ch. representation of a sacred personage . . . ; 2. anything devotedly admired."

Now, it is easy to see that, with such a name, any person calling on behalf of this company has a distinct psychological advantage. Their psychological advantage is that they are portraying themselves as being associated with things that are:

1. Sacred, or treated as sacred by the people who work for it
2. Unquestionably authoritative
3. Admired by everyone else
4. Associated with one of the most commonly used words in computer software terminology

As common sense would dictate, if you are striving to come up with a company name, it is often smarter to strive for a powerful, dignified and important-sounding name rather than a cute or clever name, which, even if it works, might fade from the public imagination in a couple of years.

In some rare cases, of course, there will be times when a cute or clever name will suit your needs just fine. Say, for example, that you live in Vermont and make muffins. One day it occurs to you that you want to start your own company and you decide to name your company the Moon Patch Muffin Company. (Since I just made this name up, I apologize to anyone who might actually be using it unbeknownst to me.) All of your friends love the name and you feel good about it, too. Who knows, the Moon Patch Muffin Company name may eventually work its way into the collective heart of America and you might end up a billionaire.

But more often than not, the choice of a cute or clever name is risky because these names are prisoners of fashion and the fickleness of trends. Fashion is a very fickle goddess, and she rules her kingdom hand in hand with her equally fickle sister, Fame. One minute you are their favorite person and the next thing you know, you have been banished from the kingdom forever.

If you don't believe my point of view on this, just go into the grocery store and look at the latest lineup of supercool sodas, juices, and bottled waters. Then go back to the store a year later and see how many of them are still on the shelf.

My point is that if you are starting your own company and have the luxury of choosing your own name, you had better pick a name you can be comfortable with for a long time. When it comes to creating an image, most CEOs would tell you this: Be wary of being cool. What is hip this year will not likely be hip next year. You may be stuck with the unpleasant task of having to peel off your own skin in order to shed a name or concept that you no longer want to be associated with.

So first of all, try to associate yourself with a name, concept, and product that you are proud of and believe that you can remain proud of for a long time.

Next you must convince people that you are not only proud of your company but that you also believe in your company.

Which brings us to the next question.

What is it that you believe in?

Your Mission

There are few companies in existence today that have not devised a mission statement and a values statement.

Unfortunately, some of these mission and values statements sound patently phony, and so they have the opposite of the intended effect.

Consider this facetious example:

Big Bob's Nuclear Bomb Discount House: Mission Statement
Our mission is to offer quality nuclear armaments to psychotic terrorists and other world leaders along with the latest variety of biological weapons. We promise quality results and unsurpassed excellence with all of our instruments of mass destruction. Along with quality customer care and a dedication to excellence, we seek to promote excellent community relations and a respect for the environment, with a special level of compassion for the rights of women and minorities, except in those instances when our clients want to blow them up.

The point that I am trying to make is that mission statements have become so formulaic that they all sound alike, and no one believes them anymore, so easy is it to spew out a paragraph of pure mental garbage as is represented in the words of the example given above.

The original intent of mission statements, I think, was to get companies and executives to actually ponder what it is they believed in and wanted to do to make the world a better place-what they really believed in, and not what they just said they believed in.

What Do Mission and Values Really Mean?

All of this mission and values stuff really started taking off in 1994 when two business school professors, Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, wrote a book called Competing for the Future in which they introduced "core competencies," a term that has now become commonplace in the business world.

I believe Hamel and Prahalad have written a very useful and intelligent book, but when you really get down to it, what they asked companies to think about was actually a very simple series of questions:

• What is it that we do?
• What are we good at?
• What skills and services make us unique?
• Why should anybody care what we have to say about anything?
• With the changes that are occurring in consumer demands, what will make people think we are the best at what we do five or ten years from now?

What Hamel and Prahalad also suggested was that every employee of every company must be able to answer a similar set of questions. The most important questions employees must ask themselves might be summarized this way:

• What is it that I do?
• What am I especially good at?
• What skills and services make me unique?
• Why should anybody care what I have to say about anything?
• With changes occurring in my field of expertise, why would anybody want to continue employing me five or ten years from now?

What executives, corporate visionaries, and managers are supposed to be responsible for, in effect, is making sure that the company knows all of the answers to the company questions and that each employee has adequate personal answers, which are at least vaguely related to the answers the company gave.

Obviously, if a company cannot answer the simple questions listed above, it has no business being in business. And just as obviously, if an employee cannot answer the questions that pertain to employees, the employee had better start looking for a new line of work.

But you will be surprised what many management professionals found when they began going around asking executives what their company was best at. Hard to believe, but many companies simply do not know or cannot express in the English language what it is that makes them more interesting or valuable than the next guy. I know because I have been one of those consultants companies have called upon to help define such things as "core competencies."

I keep noticing, by the way, that almost every time I pick up the paper, I find that yet another large company has "right-sized" or "downsized" and has laid off another group of 5,000 people.

Is it possible that all this downsizing in the United States is occurring, at least in part, because no one in these companies knows exactly what it is they're trying to sell, and why anyone should care? Could it be that someone at these companies might want to try writing a mission statement that actually makes sense?

Mission statements should not be complicated, but they should be carefully thought out and they should be as sincere as you can make them. They cannot be glib but must involve a certain amount of genuine soul-searching.

If you are going to be successful at marketing or sales, you must also do a little soul-searching of your own.

These are the main questions successful people seem to ask themselves:

• What do I really want to do with my life and talent?
• If I am not doing what I want, why am I not doing it?
• What obstacles can I remove so I can do what I want?
• Am I creating a personal mission statement that makes me happy, or one that merely sounds good to people I want to impress?
• How can I condense my personal goals in life-what I want to achieve and can achieve-into as many words as would fit on the back of a cocktail napkin?
• How can I wake up every morning and do several small, manageable, and accomplishable tasks before sundown that will allow me to get one foot closer to my goal, while reminding myself every second that no one's opinion of me matters, except for my own?

Which brings us to the next stage of the Marketing Identity Worksheet. What is it about your own character that you value the most?

This article continues on page three.
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