What Columbo and Veg-o-Matic Taught Me About Selling

Why the Veg-o-Matic Approach will not work

Too many businesses today are in decline, because they treat their products and services like commodities, continually lowering the price for what they have to offer instead of treating them like precious jewels to be sought after by the highest bidder. Too many companies treat their sales organizations in precisely the same manner. They see sales people in much the same manner as the old man at the traveling medicine show with the magic potions.

Remember the Veg-o-Matic commercials and the demonstrations at exhibitions and trade shows? It dices, it slices and the demonstrator would show you how to make your radishes look fancy. Well that worked for Veg-o-Matic, because they created a lot of hype and it had a relatively low price point and there were no opportunities for repeat business. If you are in that kind of business it will work for you, but most of you are not. You want to sell your products and services at a price that allows you to maintain healthy profit margins. For those of you who rely on recurring business if you set the price point low in the beginning you have set the expectation that it will always be low in the future.

If you walk out of a meeting and the only reason that a customer decided to do business with you is because of the price then you have a short term customer, because they will jump the next time somebody offers them a lower price and make no mistake about it someone will always have a lower price. You can argue the merits of matching quality with quality and what the customer is giving up to get a lower price, but in most cases today there are laws, terms and conditions and other factors that protect your customer. You have also reduced your sales professionals to being nothing more than telemarketers or if they come into personal contact with the customer you have turned them into the breadman that used to come to our house when I was a child. While you were buying your bread the breadman would always say something like “…and today we have Twinkies or today we have these cookies.” The truth of the matter is he always had the Twinkies and he always had the cookies and they were always the same price. I have nothing against breadmen, but do you really want your sales professionals out there hawking your wares like Twinkies for the lowest price possible? When you do that instead of distinguishing your company from everyone else you have established your organization as another “me too.” Would you pay top dollar for another “me too?” I wouldn’t.

Whether you are a designer selling your clothes to retailers and wholesalers or you are a real estate agent looking for a buyer for the property that you represent or you are in a service related industry you have to ask questions to show that you genuinely care about the people to whom you are selling and then tell them why what you have to sell meets their needs. You also need to make the case why your product or service is different than your competition. You do not have to name your competition and you do not have to specifically say this is why we are better; you can simply lead them to that conclusion. I prefer the Columbo approach if you are familiar with the movies and the television series. Columbo already knew or suspected that he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear other people say those words.

When people think something is their idea and not your idea and when you can simply validate that by demonstrating that your product or service can meet that need they are far more likely to invest in the product or service that you are selling. 

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Joe Montague has been a national sales award winner with Fortune 500 companies, enjoyed a successful management and marketing career, managed national accounts of some of the world's largest companies and is the owner of a well-respected entertainment publication and successfully represented recording and performing artists, including two Grammy Award nominees (final ballot).