The Optimal Time To Sell

Jay Leno had an ad for Doritos, “Crunch all you want, we'll make more!” That's for an unlimited product. Especially true when the cost of another copy approaches zero.

What about a one of a kind product? The common wisdom is that prices for art go up after the artist dies. Turns out the artist has to be famous, needs to die prematurely and unexpectedly, and has to leave a growing market.

What about a product, service, or offering that is viable, has an established market niche, history, customers, and competition? I think the model is selling a car you no longer want or need.

First, sell with market demand. If you have served a niche that is no longer as attractive, what has replaced it? Who is taking your money? Why can't you look more like them?

Second, get detailed and shiny before sale. I'm always surprised at the list of things that weren't worth changing for day-to-day operations that emotionally affect buyers. As one operations manager said exasperatedly, “Men can't see anything!” And she was right, so her office got paint and carpet, which moved us from no interest to completed transaction.

Get over being embarrassed. Employees, customers, and vendors all need to hear your best story for making the changes you are planning. If they are adversely affected, I usually find value increases by learning and addressing their concerns.

Don't expect to have your transaction completed with an unknown source. Document everyone you know who could care. Prioritize your list and figure the best way to approach as many as make sense.

Go long. As you make your list of all the usual suspects, figure out who should be on that list, prioritize them best first, and start building your offer to the most important choices. After a couple, you can reuse what you've built to approach as many on the list as you need.

Selling a car is not the same as owning a car. There are new skills that are usually quick to learn and can add to your remaining enjoyment even as you know your time with it is limited.

Take the time to get best value.

Discover the relationship of Truth and Time.

Where Is Your Focus?

One of my favorite clients had a breakthrough meeting last week. He was getting all caught up in scoring his work, and what his management thought of him, and how he should report his results.

Finally he said, “I'm going to rant for just a minute, and then I'm going back to focusing on production.” He did and he was.

And truly he was better. He refocused on serving customers and building an infrastructure to improve those interactions. This week he is starting to get some speed up.

How did he get so bent?

His boss kept asking him questions about when he thought money was coming in. He had already reported, but the boss thought maybe something had changed.

He was asked to use marketing for support. On one project they are 120 days late with no prospect for completion and on the new opportunity the junior marketing person who answered the phone told him, “No client should ask for that.”

He is getting rumors about a compensation change, which was taking a lot of his conscious thought, although we determined it wouldn't change his work pattern.

He was spending so much time in internally focused meetings, he was developing a dream to get paid for work he wasn't doing, because he learned someone else was doing that.

Look, in every organization there are a lot of people gaming the internal system. The whole point of Management By Objectives is to whine and limp until you convince some staffer to let you set easy objectives.

But if the organization is going to succeed, if your job is going to be worth doing, you're going to need to do something that matters. And in case after case that will involve being measured by customers.

Those customers are the future of your organization and your career. The guys making noise inside are temporary.

Are you keeping outside or inside focus?

Drafted in LibreOffice 3.3 I like it a lot!