You don’t need to know what is in the sausage to sell the sausage

Going to kick this post a little old school. Frequent readers of these posts (that is you Mum) might recall at some point in the past these  posts sometimes had some wisdom to impart to go along with the frequent use of the F word :) Hopefully this week will be one of those wisdom imparting posts but with less foul language.

As some of y’all might know I am a professional sales monkey, well maybe more monkey than professional but you get the idea. We recently added a new sales monkette to assist in selling our particular brand of sausages and I have been assisting in getting her up to speed. Our sausage is a pretty complex one if you look into all the ingredients but like all good sausages you don’t really need to know how it is made to sell it. You just need to believe in the sausage and the more faith you have that your sausage will work the easier it is to sell. If you don’t believe that your sausage will work then that comes across when you try to get people to use your sausage or they find out pretty quickly when they test it and the chances of them wanting your sausage again are pretty slim.

As a person who sells sausages I could, if I want, learn about all the ingredients and quote them verbatim to the sausage user but that would just bore them and me to death (and possibly scare them off from using the sausage). If the customer really wants to know every component, I do have a couple of sausage design experts willing to impart some of their sausage making recipe but like any product there are components that people don’t need to know because they are not really relevant and there are also bits we cannot tell about them because it is our sausage. All the best sausages keep their secret spice a secret.

Quite a few years ago I was selling a few different brands of sausages in a retail environment. People would ask why one particular sausage was better than another sausage and I could have gone into great detail regarding ingredients and where those ingredients were sourced but they didn’t really want to know all that – they just wanted a reason. My simple reply was it was better because it cost more and the reason why it cost more is that it was better. They could visually see which sausage was better than the other so what else did they really need to know? I would also point out to them that once they got the sausage home it wasn’t like there were a bunch of other sausages to compare it to anyway (usually) so they would be happy with the sausage that worked best for them both financially and size wise.

Don’t overthink the selling of your sausage, as long as the truth is that your sausage works. Selling based on being trustworthy is the best and most rewarding kind of sale.

At that same time (retail sausage seller for those of you with a short attention span) I also had a team of sausage sellers that I managed and they were sausage experts (or at least they thought they were) who foodied out a bit on what was actually in the sausage. I taught them the most basic trick of sausage selling, listen to what the customer wants then find the right sausage for them. As Epictetus said, ‘We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak’.

These days I personally only really sell one type of sausage, but I am hoping to add a short duration sausage to the menu soon (yes, an in-joke, not that there aren’t usually a couple in each post but this one I am particularly proud of)

Bottom line as a sausage seller: I have to make the end user of the sausage confident that the sausage is a good sausage for them, that the sausage will work for them, that the sausage is better than other sausages and that the sausage will satisfy their needs. I don’t need to know everything about the sausage itself but I do need to be confident that the customer will be happy with their decision, especially because my income relies upon repeat sausage use.

So James, you ask yourself if you have read this far down the post, what the heck does this have to do with Poets Day?

Well funnily enough it has a great deal to do with Poets Day as one of the basic tenets of this whole thing (according to me and as I created this it must be correct) is derived from the Serenity prayer:

Give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed,

The courage to change what can be changed,

And the wisdom to know one from the other

As a Sales Monkey I am never going to be smarter than the sausage maker (according to them and it is not really worth debating) so I cannot change the sausage. Good sausage makers will occasionally listen to the sausage sellers and sometimes modify the sausage or add new sausages. But truth be known, as long as I trust that the sausage works then I don’t really need to know what is in the sausage, just that it will do what I said it will do.

One final point, which is a bit obvious also – you don’t really need or want to know what makes the sausage great to want to buy it as long as you trust the sausage vendor.

Work hard, play hard and earn your inspiration – and for the kiwis enjoying a great summer throw another snag on the barbie for me, I trust you bought the right ones :)

Happy Poets Day