What Makes A Good Sales Deal?

Going through the tedium of sorting out my business’s quarterly sales tax returns, before sending them off to the guys I outsource the collation too, is not an ideal way to spend probably the last sunny Saturday morning of the year in England.  Normally I’d bang on some funky tunes (man) and get on with it, but today I fancied a change, so listened again to a couple of old episodes of one of my fave journo’s (Evan Davis) radio shows.  Dubbed a chief execs chat show, The Bottom Line is certainly worth a listen for aspirant business owner-managers.

Barry Gibbons was Chairman & CEO of Burger King from 1989 to 1994 and is now a regular on the speaking circuit and media soundbite shows, and when asked by Evan how many of the 20,000 books on Leadership Amazon sells he reads, he interestingly described how he’d lost faith with the ‘manual’ approaches peddled by the majority and migrated to biogs.  Something perhaps that people writing a (yet another) sales book may want to consider.

The pundit mentioned a joke about two Western Execs in a bar, you draw a line between them and say get the other to cross the line to your side.  The outcome is they’ll still be in the juicer next morning having not moved.  Whereas Eastern Execs in a similar scenario immediately say ‘you come to my side and I’ll come to yours’ and they get on with it straight away and progress.  His message was a cracker of a line (he claimed was a Chinese proverb) that when you feel someone’s shafting you a tad would be great to trot out:

“a good agreement is one where both parties leave the table smiling”