Girl Scout Beet Juice®
If the Girl Scouts organization really wanted to teach the girls about sales, they wouldn’t offer cookies. Instead, they would sell Girl Scout Beet Juice® or Girl Scout Life Insurance®.
This was on my mind because my daughter is in her first season of selling Girl Scout cookies, an activity that is supposedly designed for skills development—i.e., it’s not just a money grab, because it teaches them sales skills. As part of the activity, she even went to “Cookie University.”
If you’re selling a product everyone wants, the real business lesson is in the power of branding and product-market fit. If you have an awesome product, you don’t even need to “sell” it. When Zola talks to prospective customers, the conversation doesn’t last much longer than, “Do you want to buy cookies?”
It's hard to mess things up when the product-market fit and brand are that good. Even with an unpaid, low-skill, high-turnover salesforce, customers would still come to you!
That lesson is obvious if you’ve spent five minutes in business school, or reading a business book. But in my experience, leaders often fail to extend that lesson on selling exactly what your revenue customers want to their other types of customers.
For example, I run into leaders who can tell you in immense detail what their clients and customers need, but if you ask those leaders to articulate why employees choose their organization over others, the answers are typically fuzzier. In the nonprofit space, that dynamic often appears when discussing volunteers, donors, and other stakeholders.
The implication is that anyone who needs to say Yes to make the system work and who has a choice in the matter should be considered a customer. It’s worth deeply understanding how they view the brand and what cookie flavor would make them say, “Of course.”
That lesson is not just for our organizations. Leaders should also have good answers to questions that reflect on them individually. Questions like: Why would an employee pick me over the next manager in my organization? Beyond general competencies, how will my boss decide who will get the promotion?
Giving My Own Sales Lesson
To make sure Zola understood the lesson about understanding your customers, I told her that I wouldn’t buy any Girl Scout Cookies because, for diet purposes, I don’t like to have sweets in the house. But I told her that if she thought about the things I find valuable, I’d eagerly listen to another pitch.
This principled stand led to a debate in our household. My wife thinks it’s ridiculous not to buy cookies from your own kids! But I’m playing the long game. When Zola takes this sales lesson to heart, it fuels her Fortune 100 CEO career, and, in 35 years, buys me the Porsche that I can’t afford now—precisely because we have to spend money on the kids—it’ll all be worth it. 😀