Bill Gates said “Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.”

Technology is changing every day and the “new thing” will not be the “new thing” in six months. Someone, somewhere will built it better, smaller and cheaper. Your great idea of an app, a dot com. website or computer program will be challenged and most do not survive long term.

I made mention of this in a blog last week but look at Blackberry and Kodak for example. The technology of those companies and the market share that they both controlled lasted for a while, but competitors came along and stole the market from them. Kodak had a 100 year run with selling film before digital cameras and phones were invented with memory chips. Blackberry owned the smart phone market until the iPhone. Look at Intel processing chips, they were used in just about every laptop computer. Since laptop computers are being replaced by tablets, Intel has had to change their corporate strategy to remain viable in this changing market.

Why am I telling you all this? The thing that will never change in business is the human element. Take our business for example. It doesn’t matter how great the technology becomes, it will never replace the voice and the thinking of a salesman. There will never be an app that can have a conversation, understand numbers and negotiate a contract. The problem becomes when we as salesmen began to let technology become our main focus and we can easily lose our way. Emails and texts are much easier than a phone call and require much less preparation. We have all experienced an email that says something in writing that the sender did not mean to imply. When you are speaking with someone, you hear the voice and the meaning behind the words. In an email all you see are the words.

If you think about your business last week. Which technology did you use most? If the phone was at the bottom of the list, this blog post should be a wakeup call. My State Farm insurance agent who has insured everything we have for many years called me last Friday to just say hello. He didn’t have anything to sell me or any reason other than to say hello. He could have emailed me, sure, but he called instead. When I hung up with him, I realized that is what I need to do much more of. That call did one very important thing. It reminded me (his client) that he appreciated my business and was thinking about me. In business that is very very powerful and it is the single one element that technology will never replace.

So in business, when you look at your desk and you see a computer, it represents websites, emails, and scans. The cell phone represents calls and texts. I am guessing that on the side of your desk you probably have a phone. If you ask yourself which of these devises represent the most important thing in business, let me tell you, it is a phone call. Just like my State Farm rep, he choose the phone to reach out to me and that my friends is business 101. The human element is so very powerful and unlike computers and emails, it genders trust and respect and repeat business. KT

The founder of Forbes Magazine B.C. Forbes said, “If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.”

This is true and it is inescapable. Just ask Kodak, Circuit City, Hudson Motors, Edsel Motor Company, BlackBerry, Motorola, Nokia, etc. All these companies rested on their past success and expected it to continue and did not see their market turning until it was too late.

The smartest business leaders I have known were all very focused on the details of their companies, their customers and the products they produced. In 1985 when you thought about buying a luxury automobile, you thought about Lincoln and Cadillac. They owned that market. Today when you think about buying a luxury automobile, Lincoln and Cadillac come to mind only after Lexus, Mercedes, BMW and Infinity. The two car companies just did not see their market changing in time to change with it.

Look at BlackBerry. In 2006 they owned 95% of the global smart phone market. Today they own less than 10% and falling because of a little invention called the iPhone. All the Blackberry execs had houses in Aspen, private jets and they thought no one could beat them in the marketplace. Well, they were wrong, just like Kodak thought people were going to continue buying film for cameras.

The point is to get personal with your customers and ask them how you are doing. You will be surprised at how open they are at giving you feedback. You will also learn some very valuable trends they as customers are seeing. Maybe if Kodak, Lincoln and BlackBerry had really gone to the street, got out of their offices and asked their customers for feedback, just maybe they could have gotten ahead of the curve before it was too late.

Driving your business means to meet with your customers and find out what you need to know. KT

Every now and then you just have to fire a customer. There could be many reasons but usually it is because they are either not honest or truthful or just a doofus.

One such story happened years ago on a hotel we were selling in Gatlinburg, TN, for an important client. The buyer and his equity investor were spending the night and touring the hotel in Gatlinburg. We are usually at showings but this was one on a weekend where the general manager just handled the showing for us.

We were at our lake house and I get this call from my client. The client proceeded to tell me what the buyer had done at his property. Apparently that evening, the buyer ran up a $300 bar tab and decided he would make a pass at one of the hotel’s female employees. Well to summarize the event, it proceeded beyond a pass and ended up that the buyer and this employee ran around all the bases, including home plate (if you know what I mean). AND they were seen by other employees at the hotel.

When I ended the call with my client I got this boneheaded buyer on the phone. I will not tell you in this blog post what I said to that buyer, but needless to say, he left that hotel at that moment and was never welcomed again by our company. When we talked on that call, I left zero questions as to what was going to happen. Of course the buyer has his side of the story that he wanted to tell me, but let’s just say there was not a gap in the conversation. I was doing all the talking.

The funny thing was, the next time I saw him a few years later was at my daughter’s college graduation from Samford University (a Christian college) because his daughter was graduating at the same time. Ha. He saw me across the room and I saw him. Let’s just say he knew better than to come over to me and my family.

The point is you do not have to be all things to all people and allow a customer to mistreat you. There is a standard acceptable guideline of behavior that must be maintained at all times. This bonehead stepped way over the line of acceptable behavior and that behavior probably costs him very dearly in the economic sense because he lost my respect and trust. Sometimes you just have to choose who you do business with because life is too short to be involved with a person that could hurt your reputation and your business. KT

Sales are mostly contingent on the attitude of the salesman, not the attitude of the buyer. How many times have you seen a pushy salesman that only wanted one thing? To make a commission on you. There is an internal radar in most of us that doesn’t like this. In sales the most important attitude is that of the salesman. Integrity selling is doing what is right and honest for the buyer even if it is not in the salesman’s best interest.

Some of the greatest salesman I have ever encountered were always more about letting the buyer make the decision on his or her own schedule versus trying to push the sale through. Integrity selling is also about getting to know the buyer before selling him something. Getting to know his or her story and about their family and how they got started. I have yet to see someone that will not open up when they asked about the most important things in their lives.

At Hotel AG we have sold a lot of hotels. For me personally, I have sold a lot of hotels but the statistic I am most proud of is the low number of failures of people that have bought hotels through me. There are many of my current clients that have been clients for 15-25 years. I got a call the other day from a client in Nashville that I met in 1992 when we first worked together and he wanted to talk to me about selling his hotels. These are the things that mean the most to me in our line of work.

That client from 1992 worked with me when I was flat broke and needed so desperately to make a sale but I still let the decision be about what was best for him. As you get older like I am, it’s the repeat customers that mean the most because you know you handled it the right way years ago.

The salesman should never take his cue from the buyer, meaning he should never let the buyer set the attitude climate of the meeting. This should always be the salesman and his attitude should always be transparent, open, forthcoming and honest. People can usually tell if they are being mismanaged or lied to and it is the salesman that sets the tempo and mood of the meeting.

Selling is not about the attitude of the buyer, it is about the attitude of the salesman. Just like you, people like to be treated honestly and fairly and they usually respond favorably when they are. KT