All posts by Keith Thompson

Selling with spin

Career

Have you ever heard the term, selling with spin? It means to try and spin the deal better than it really is. I don’t like sales spin. I like to know the good and the bad about what I am buying and I suspect that most are like me. 25 years an ago I was selling a Holiday Inn and we had created a great looking book with pretty pictures of the hotel in it best light. I was meeting with a buyer and he scanned over the book and looked at me and said, “You must be really pushing a dog to spend this much time on a book.” I had to laugh because this Holiday Inn wasn’t a complete dog, but it did have an old long sad face. Ha

I used to know this gentlemen who thought of himself as a salesman’s salesman. The perfect example of what a salesman should be. The funny thing is people didn’t trust him and didn’t believe what he was saying. He thought the basic criteria to selling was to inflate the advantages of what he was selling.  Every time I was around him, I felt like I needed a shower.

A year or so ago I was showing a hotel with the owner to some buyers. The owner was telling the buyers things that anyone could see was an exaggeration of the facts. To the owner it was perfect and didn’t need a single dollar in upgrades. As soon as the showing was over and I was alone with the buyers I told them what a disaster I thought the hotel was. They smiled and agreed because they knew they could now trust me. We ended up selling the hotel to those same buyers but if I had tried to snow them on the condition, they would have walked away.

Years ago I started doing this thing where I would tell buyers all the bad things first before I would tell them the good things. I found that if you get the bad things out of the way, you don’t have surprises down the road and people seem to trust you more.

Real selling is not about slick sales pitches and smooth talking. It is about being real, straightforward, honest and transparent. If you are in sales, you will sell far more by being honest about what you are selling than trying to talk someone into it. KT

The Colonel

Career, Family, Life

I want to tell you a story about Colonel Sanders. The meaning of the story is, it is never too late to be who you are supposed to be. I did not write this and took it from a Facebook post I saw yesterday and thought I would share it with you. The following is his story:

At age 5 his father died

At age 16 he quit school

At age 17 he had already lost 4 jobs

At age 18 he got married

Between ages 18 and 22 he was railroad conductor

At age 19 he became a father

At age 20 his wife left him and took their baby daughter

He joined the Army and was washed out

He applied for Law School and was rejected

He became and insurance salesman and failed again

He then became a cook and dishwasher in small café

At age 65 he retired

On the 1st day of retirement he received a check from the Government for $105

He felt the Government was saying he wasn’t capable to provide form himself

He decide to commit suicide because he was such a failure

He sat under a tree writing a will but ended up writing what he could have accomplished with his life

He realized there was much more that he hadn’t done

There was one thing he could do better than anyone he knew

And that was how to cook

He borrowed $87 and bought and fried up some chicken using his own recipe

He went door to door to sell to his neighbors in Kentucky

Remember at age 65 was ready to commit suicide

At age 88 he had built an empire and became a billionaire

KFC is now the second largest restaurant chain with 20,000 locations in 123 countries

The message is, it is never too late. KT

Rudy

Life

I don’t often refer to a movie in a scriptural context. That said, one could make the exception with the movie Rudy. It is one of the top 5 guy movies of all time.

I have seen the movie probably 25 times and it has a great message. The message is that, heart (the will to overcome) is greater than just having talent. The movie is about a kid from Chicago who dreamed of playing football for Notre Dame. He was 5 foot nothing, 100 and nothing without a spec of real football talent but ended up being the only football player since 1975 to be carried off the field on the shoulders of his teammates. He only played in one game and then only for a couple of plays, yet he stirred the hearts of his teammates and Notre Dame because he would not give up on his dream. What a great story and also a true story.

He is probably like many of us in that he didn’t come from the right family, didn’t live in the right area, didn’t go to the right school, didn’t have the right look, didn’t know the right people and was stereotyped as too little, too slow and too dumb with no athletic ability. His real name is Rudy Ruettiger and he is 67 years now and still lives in Joliet Illinois. There are many YouTube videos of him speaking to groups about life, dreams and determination. He is the real deal. KT

Life is a lot like golf

Life

If the game of golf is played correctly, it reminds me a lot of life.

One of the main rules in golf is you have to play the ball where it lies. Meaning that if you hit it in the sand, high weeds or up against a tree, you have to play the ball from there. There are no mulligans (a do over), foot wedges or your buddy telling you to just hit another one. I could write pages just on the rules of golf, but the overview is that you are supposed to play the ball from where it comes to rest.

In life, we sometimes make a shot (do something) that we wished we could do over. Unfortunately we have to deal with the circumstances we find ourselves in. We can’t take it back, do it over or just say, “that one didn’t count.” No, in life all the shots count and you have deal with it just as it is.

I laugh at the email recall function. Supposedly it allows you to retract an email after it has been sent. The funny part is that if you receive an email recall notification, the first thing you do if go back and closely read the first email. It may have been an email you didn’t even want to read, but the recall notification makes you want to read it. Ha

In life, you can never un-ring a bell. When you say things you shouldn’t, you can be forgiven but you can never erase it from the other person’s memory. Basically in life, like in golf, you get one shot and you have to deal with whatever the result is.

I am at best, a very average golfer and I have seen some poor shots over the years. I remember one time the guy I was playing with hit into a sand trap. He got set to hit out of the trap and flubbed the shot and it rolled back in the same spot he had just hit from. This guy thought if he hurried and hit it again it would have a better result. By hurrying he did the same thing again and then got flustered and did it a third time. It was all I could do not to laugh. I remember holding the towel over my face so he couldn’t see me laughing.

So in golf as in life, we should always be honest with our score and think through the decision before attempting it. If the shot is bad, keep your cool and settle yourself before attempting the next shot because that second shot, just as the first one, will count on the score card. Even pro golfers will make a mistake but the real test is (just like in life) whether they can recover from the mistake and go on to complete a good round. KT

The difference between signing a paycheck on the front or on the back

Career, Life

In this political climate we current have in America, I find it increasingly hard to trust the opinions of politicians (except our military) that have only ever signed a paycheck on the back. Like most of the people in office today and the media, they have only signed a paycheck on the back and most of them have been on the government payroll all of their adult lives. Signing a paycheck on the front is what employers do and signing a paycheck on the back is what employees do.

Most of our political leaders have never employed one person and have spent their adult life feeding off a government job for decades. They have never had to meet a payroll on Friday when they didn’t have the money. They have never had people with families depending on them. All they know is to criticize and cast blame and tear the other person down.

I think it is important to choose who you listen to. I loved the movie with Robin Williams when he ran for President and he said that every politician should be like a NASCAR driver and have to wear a jacket that shows who all their sponsors are. Wouldn’t that be a hoot to really see who is contributing large dollars to their election campaigns and receiving in exchange promises that the American public would not agree to?

So if you ask me, the ones I want to really hear from are the ones who have actually done something, accomplished something and actually have been in the arena and not just the stands.

I think the following quote from Teddy Roosevelt could be one of the greatest of all time.

Theodore Roosevelt said the following quote, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” KT