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How to Market a Product Nobody Wants

Chapter Nine continued...



THAT ISN'T SELLING, IS IT?

"We have a sales staff to sell our tough products," a president of a plastics extrusion company told me who was sitting next to me on a plane.

"You mean to sell products that nobody wants."

"Right....well, I wouldn't phrase it that way, but anybody can sell our best products. We wouldn't need salespeople if that is all we sold."

"What would happen if the salespeople spent most of their time selling your best products, the products that the customer most likely wants to buy?" I asked.

"We wouldn't be able to handle it," he said.

My off-the-cuff recommendation to him was pretty simple. Do one of two things:

  1. Either fire the sales staff. Keep a few salespeople to just be order takers on the company's best products.
  2. Or add a second or third production shift and direct his sales staff to sell products that the customer wanted to buy.

This JUMP-START GOLDEN RULE first started to plant itself in me years ago when I was in college. This little seedling didn't emanate from classes, but from a Ford dealer that I got to know. This was the era of the Mustang and the Falcon. These two cars were forever linked in my mind. The Mustang was the hottest selling car at the time; the Falcon was a dog and literally an accident waiting to happen.

The dealer told me that he could sell every Mustang he could get his hands on. However, Ford allocated the number of Mustangs (their best product) that he could get from the factory. The allocation was based on how many Falcons he sold (their worst product).

"You mean, you have to sell ten of Ford's worst product to get to sell one of their best?" I asked, full of youth naiveté.

"Right," he said.

"So, you know that the Falcon is a dog, that for every one of your customers that are pleased by buying a Mustang that ten of your customers will be ultimately disappointed because high pressure salesmanship forced a Falcon down their throat."

"Right."

With that marketing philosophy, you could see that Ford itself was an accident waiting to happen. When those Falcon buyers were ready to buy another car in three years or probably less because the car was a dog, they would most likely be looking someplace else. That someplace else happened to be Japan. The American car manufacturers opened the door wide for the Japanese to enter because they violated the JUMP-START GOLDEN RULE. Sure, in the short term it worked. They were able to sell a lot of Falcons because the dealerships used hammer-and-tong "salesmanship" to sell those dogs to get the Mustang.

What would have happened if that Ford dealer could have sold as many Mustangs as the market would bear, I asked.

"I'd be rich. We wouldn't have to discount like we do with the Falcon. I'd have a lot of really happy customers with Mustangs. My salespeople would build a statue of me and think of me as a saint."

Changing an automotive product line, of course, costs a fortune. But, could Ford have added more shifts to build Mustangs? Could they have converted assembly lines from Falcon to Mustang? Sure they could. It would have cost a lot, but Ford's benefits would have been equal to the dealers' benefits:

Dealers Ford
"I'd be rich." They would have set sales and profitability records.
"I'd have a lot of happy customers." They would have a lot of happy customers. With a huge bank of happy customers, the door to the U.S. market would have been very narrow for the Japanese.
"My salespeople would build a statue of him and think of him as a saint." The dealers would build a statue of Henry Ford and think of him as a saint. The car companies and their dealers are usually on an adversarial relationship because the companies try to force the dealers into selling products that people don't want to buy.



Ford, of course, learned their lesson from the Mustang-Falcon marketing strategies. When Ford came out with the Taurus, they did everything possible, and some things that were impossible, to sell as many Tauruses as the customers wanted to buy. The Taurus ended up as the best selling automobile for five straight years. Dealers didn't have to buy 10 latter-day Falcons to sell a Taurus. If all they wanted to do was sell America's most popular car, they could do that.
There are tremendous benefits to using the JUMP-START GOLDEN RULE:

  1. Sales will increase. It only makes sense that if you're putting all your energies into products that customers want to buy, and very little effort into products that customers don't want to buy, that sales will increase significantly.
  2. Customers are happy. Customers haven't been mauled to buy bigger and more. They are getting what they want, albeit just a little bit more. A happy customer is much more likely to become the most treasured customer of all—a repeat customer.
  3. Can-do swagger. Morale will never be better. By focusing on products that customers want to buy, each person has more confidence, has more fun at work, develops a little swagger in their step. After all, they aren't selling Falcons. They're selling their company's version of the Mustang.

    How important is swagger? Well, companies spend thousands of dollars each year to help motivate their work force through audio and video tapes, books, lectures, placards, you name it. The best motivational device is success. If people are selling and producing a product that people want to buy, they're going to feel successful, they are going to feel motivated, they are going to swagger.
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