Confessions Of A Customer® By Eric Anderson
THE THRILL OF THE HUNT Hunting Is Selling — Killing Is Closing
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here does your biggest thrill come from? Prospecting for more customers? Closing the sale? Ensuring repeat customers? Building longerterm relationships? Networking with new local outdoor groups? Engaging socially online or face-to-face? If you can bring home the bacon and put food on the table for your family and your employees, you must be doing something right… but what is that “something” exactly? As a species, man remains a hunter/gatherer (H/G) with omnivorous teeth in his jaw to this day. Our pre-civilized background is wandering in search of food — both vegetables which are gathered and meat which is hunted. Later, tool-making helped the H/Gs become much more efficient and advance from primitive hand-to-mouth subsistence. Spears, grind stones, awls, hoes and big sticks came before more advanced bows and arrows. The invention of agriculture cut down the amount of wandering necessary, but not the radius for hunting. Further technical refinements to hunting equipment came along including the recurved bow, crossbow and metal arrowheads. Then firearms arrived shortening the hunting radius for H/Gs. The Internet, smart phones, refrigerators and fast-food apps have now decreased the radius from our couch to the front door. No wonder obesity is overwhelming our society! But I digress — back to how hunting applies to the evolution of selling and its subsequently similar decrease of shopping radius brought about by technological advances and societal change.
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It is very easy to blur the natural mixture of “hunting” and “killing” processes in the above list of questions leading me to ask myself — and you — if we truly know the difference between the two? “Hunting” of course, requires a lot more planning and strategizing than “killing” does, but one cannot perform the latter without the former. I became intimately familiar with the differences this last hunting season by bagging my first big game animal — a pronghorn antelope. Metaphorically, the entire months-long process helped me more emphatically learn the differences between the two. The “kill” itself is only one small part of the experience tied to flexing the index finger for a millisecond while sighting through the crosshairs, but it seems the only part on which most people focus. I feel this is misleading to the rest of the world who only sees the kill… without the hunt. The evidence here is the obsession with hunter’s selfie photos staged next to a dead animal while holding a big weapon. It’s somewhat similar to you being photographed with your first motorcycle purchase… or at your powersports store’s grand opening. It supposedly portrays the entire motorcycling experience in one shot, but it doesn’t, does it? That’s only the vehicular “bagging” part excluding the utilization and riding parts -- except for the fact nothing had to give up its life for sustenance or the thrill of the hunt. Admittedly, there was an adrenaline rush when stalking and killing the animal… similar but different to closing payment for a $30,000 UTV off the showroom floor. Despite some feelings of remorse in killing an innocent animal, it made more sense to “work for my meat” than simply buy it fully prepped and packaged at a fast-food franchise or the grocery store. Life is very, very easy these days when you look from my newfound hunter POV. This experience and its associated extra effort put me back in touch with the fundamentals of hunting… and in many ways selling. Just because we have the power of the Internet, social media and modern point-of-sale aides does not mean we can lose the fundamental methods of selling. The 5 “simplified” steps I still use to this day are here along with an abbreviated list of how hunting leads to killing like selling leads to conversion.
