Who wins in a fight between accountants and lawyers

Many moons ago, I was hawking computers to the masses.

I won't get into all the details, but suffice to say that it was an education along with my first real sales job. I was selling expensive computer equipment to people with the money to pay for it.

One of the ways in the IT business to reach more is to sell through people called VARs - Value Added Resellers.

It's less value add - and more bribing with huge commissions. But, that's a story for another time.

One of these big ones was located in Montreal, which I travelled to every two weeks to get business. 

What you're supposed to do with these VARs is pay them a big annual fee to "get the pleasure" to sell to their sales reps. I think the price was something like $10,000 - which is no big deal if you're Microsoft. But, the company I worked at the time, “ain't that”.

So, we didn't pay. Instead, we did something far smarter, in my opinion. We cut commission cheques (called SPIFF in the business) directly to the sales reps who would sell our computers.

Now, most of these sales reps were making like $50K per year. And, we told them we'd cut them a cheque for about 10x their normal commission - which we could because we sold expensive shit.

Now instead of that $10,000 going to some corporate overlord, we were putting it into the greedy pockets of the sales reps.

And, guess what? We made a shit ton of money. Even reps I didn't know were calling me up to hear about the deals because their buddy 3 cubicles down had just got their $3K cheque from me.

That was until the day I got escorted off the floor and was told I wasn't welcome anymore because we didn't pay that fee. 

I didn't care. I knew they'd still sell my stuff. Because I was paying the reps cold hard cash to hawk my wares.

The point here is follow the money. Put money into people's pockets (legally of course), and you'll have a client for life.

Which brings me to the point I want to make about selling life insurance. Some people focus on death benefit selling and other cash value.

But a little old lady I closed a deal on a few weeks ago wasn’t having any of this.

“I want to spend every last dollar. I’ve worked hard and I want to spend in my retirement”. If this is true or not, this is how she felt. And, I wasn’t about to argue with her on the subject.

Instead I said:

“You can spend every last dollar with a life insurance policy. But here’s the difference, if you don’t want to spend in a given year, you don’t have to. But, if you leave all your money in a RRIF. Spend it or not, you still have to pay the taxman. With insurance, you have a choice to pay the tax or not. And, if you get to the end of your life and you haven’t spent every last dollar. Well, every last dollar left over get optimized to your kids as tax-free income.”

She looked back:

“Let me see those numbers again.”

It all comes down to numbers and having a different perspective. And, showing a different perspective. This is the delicate dance of sales at it’s finest, if I don’t say so myself.

See you next week!

Andrew