Yesterday: Great stories start inside the company and go out. Great stories capture the hearts of people including buyers, prospects, and even cold leads.
Today: Living It! "It," is your product or your service.
A few years ago I walked into a nice department store, I wanted to buy nice shoes and a nice suit. The man, a "fashion adviser", selling the suits and shoes was dressed in an unattractive suit and bad shoes! His credibility was lost because he wasn't living “it,” so I didn't buy anything from him.
Here's a story from our friend and former intern, Carlton Douglas. We were blessed to have him and we're proud to know him. Carlton "lives it" and we could feel it when we hired him. Here's his story, in his own words.
From the Desk of the FORMER Intern
I logged onto the website to get the address of Sales By 5 for a resume (I’m trying to get a Promotions Manager position at Indie 103.1 here in Los Angeles). Seeing the familiar SB5 color scheme and then Erik and Nan’s video posts, my mind jolted back in time to the months in which the company employed me.
Some people feel like crap thinking about past jobs. I, too, have a few of those jobs, but Sales By 5 wasn’t horrendous enough to make the list. In fact, it was the best job I’ve ever had. Out of everything it taught and reinforced in my working behavior, the most important was that I could do anything. ANYTHING. I don’t mean that in a sappy, Reading Rainbow way, either. If someone asks me to do something, the truth of the matter is that I can do it… if I want to do it.
Present Day: I’m in Hollywood. That’s pretty cool. I met a guy on Sunset Blvd. and La Brea, Antonio, whose brother writes music for Lil Bow Wow. He hooked me up with these guys who do just about everything in music business – booking, management, PR, and pretty much anything else you can think of. I snag a short gig doing miscellaneous work for them.
I get a call the night I might them telling me to get them a list of all of Whitesnake’s managers and label affiliations since the mid-70s. I tell them that it’ll be done by morning - without a doubt. Then, I realize that its one in the morning, and I’m still too poor to have Internet access at my apartment. I don’t want to disappoint these guys, so I proceed dialing every number in my phone to get some help, but everyone is asleep. Just great! Thirty minutes later, I remember that I have web access on my phone, and I’m off searching through Google to find almost 40 years of management and label information about a band I’m too young to care about. By four in the morning, my task was complete, and I had impressed guys who would end up giving me a few more gigs.
Hopefully that sounds impressive to you. If not, you should give it a try. On top of doing the research, try it ON A CELL PHONE! It was the Sales By 5 attitude I had embraced that got me through this trying task.
My first day on the job, Erik had me figuring out where to get beer bottles with custom labels, filled with beer of course. Oh, and it wasn’t just your average Sunday afternoon football 24 case of Budweiser. I needed to find 1,000 bottles! Google was always my friend, but I wasn’t that great at it. Erik tosses a few pointers my way, and I’ve got at least 10 options in front of my face in 5 seconds. I never knew that being a Google Master could be so beneficial to your career!
Six months after last stepping into the office, I still use my Sales By 5 learned abilities. It wasn’t that one instance in which what I learned while working with the company helped me out. Most recently, I wrote up a bio for a country singer at the request of Shakira’s former publicist – using a similar format to press releases done for SB5. She wants to give me more work! I “marketed” myself to a wealthy jazz enthusiast, who heard me playing sax on Hollywood Boulevard, about financing the recording of a jazz album. He’s digging the idea.
Sales By 5 didn’t change my life. My life had yet to begin before working with them! Things are beginning to take off, and I can credit so much of that to this company.
Erik & Nan -keep your eyes on the mail. Your million-dollar check will be there soon enough.
Carlton D.
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Do you see the difference between living it and just going through the motions?
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