Science and Management

Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

I’m in the middle of building a new sales management seminar and I’m breaking out a separate unit on the differences between general sales management and the management of telephone sales.And there are some crucial distinctions, though I just want to touch on one, here.Telephone selling can be, and because it can be, it should and must be, SCIENTIFIC.

What do I mean?

First, let’s establish the value of science. When an area of study or conduct becomes scientific: (1) It is systematically and critically monitored, measured, and managed, and recognized as an important process; (2) Its mysteries are revealed over time; (3) And this leads to greater understanding and more consistent control of its causes and effects; its inputs and outputs, and its results and contributions.Ultimately, science aspires to being able to say, like a recipe, if you heat water to 212 degrees, Fahrenheit, at sea level, the water will boil.Keep doing exactly this, and you’ll keep getting rewarded with boiling water, which as we know has its uses beyond making pasta, significant as that one is.A well run business seeks consistent and reliable results; in a word, predictability. This makes nearly everybody happy, from workers to shareholders.

Selling, as a discipline, as a field, also strives to produce consistent, reliable, and ever-improving results.

Specifically, we try to the extent we can to govern carefully those known behaviors that produce and increase “yeses,” and discourage or avoid “no’s.” When we’re failing at this job, we seek understanding to help us to recover quickly and to get back on track.Telephone selling is, potentially, more scientific than field selling because we can control at least one side of the communication equation: What the seller says, how he says it, when he says it, and how he responds to what the prospect says.

In practical terms, we can SCRIPT the sales process, bringing it to a boil, if not at will then with great consistency, once we have discovered the “laws” underpinning certain types of conversations.Also, and crucially, we can monitor and manage telephone salespeople in real time, listening, side by side if we wish, to every word being said. When sellers deviate from the call path that has been developed, tested, and proven to work, a finger can be pointed exactly to where the seller needs to get back onto his message.

Nothing else, in any other area of business I know, attains this kind of clear feedback and guidance, nor benefits as much and as directly as this kind of intervention from managementAs you know we can preserve the entire transaction in a phone sale through recordings for unlimited playback and analysis, if we deem it to be useful.By capturing events, live and recorded, we can LEARN MORE and MAKE RAPID ADJUSTMENTS & IMPROVEMENTS.And then, we can revise scripts for all, and distribute the latest and the greatest, very quickly, applying en masse our newfound knowledge.Of course, none of this is visible to the buyer, which contributes to its effectiveness.In field selling, the closest we usually get is accompanying a seller to see a prospect, but we can’t exert such meticulous control without seeming unduly intrusive and distracting.

Having said this, using a scientific, systematic process seems essential, at least in telephone selling, because WE CAN.Why would we ever accept making sales as an idiosyncratic, iffy result when it can become more predictable, commonplace, and more profitable?Again, this is one of the crucial differences and actual advantages of telephone selling versus field selling.

Fireworks were developed by the ancient Chinese in the Second century BC and are the oldest and most basic form of rocket.
Many of our modern day weaponry can trace it’s history back to the firework, thanks to the fireworks major component `gunpowder’. These early fireworks were developed in to rockets and were used in warfare such as the invasion of China by the Mongols in 1279.The Mongols and Arabs brought gunpowder to the West and the idea of the cannon and hand gun were conceived by utilising the explosive properties of gunpowder.

The early firework was even the forerunner for the modern space rocket. It was the American scientist Robert Hutchings who swapped the solid fuel in fireworks for a liquid fuel system which pioneered modern space rocket technology that ultimately led to man landing on the moon in 1969.

There is such an array of fireworks available today, however, the basic principle is pretty much the same. Traditionally fireworks used gunpowder, comprising of 75% Potassium Nitrate, 15% Charcoal and 10% Sulphur to provide the explosive powder to give the firework the thrust to go into the air. Today however, fireworks may use a variety of other chemicals.

The firework has basically has two phases, the first phase comprises of tightly packed explosive material being contained in a shell. When a fuse is lit, it burns rapidly into the core of the rocket, the gunpowder in phase 1 burns and gives off hot exhaust gases which fire backwards and sends the firework shooting through the air. This is an example of Newton’s third law of motion; whenever a particle A exerts a force on another particle B, B simultaneously exerts a force on A with the same magnitude in the opposite direction. The strong form of the law further postulates that these two forces act along the same line. This law is often simplified into the sentence, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”