Posts
Comments
Hey everyone,
This is my first post!
This is what I've been wondering lately:
Who is the best sales person in the world? Who knows?
‘Sales competitions’ generally refers to ‘in-house’ competitions established by managers to motivate their sales people to compete against one another.
Recently I began thinking about the prospects for a ‘world sales tournament’ of sorts:
Successful sales people have lots of money. But sales is derided, whether it be in real estate, ‘charity mugger’ fundraisers, or even the people doing tenders for defence contracts.
What if we could could take their money, convert it to prestige, and take a smooth commision on the whole thing?
Sales tournaments! The World Series of Sales! The Sales Olympics. Major League Sales. Who says sales people ought to pay an entry fee anyway (except, perhaps to get a manageable number of entrants). If there are companies out there with products or services to sell, getting the best, most competitive sales people in the game to sell them is a highly desirable service itself. In return for product to sell, said product and service companies could sponsor the competition.
Sales people have difficulty switching industries, despite their highly tuned sales skills. Product and industry knowledge is easy to pick-up, but soft skills are tougher to gain. Never-the-less, recruiters are reluctant to pick up sales people from other industries - the numbers don’t always make sense. Someone working for a luxury car dealership may have huge sales numbers, but a luxury hand bag dealer might not be able to translate the numbers over. Having a high sales ranking, in a similar way that programmers are ranked in coding competition websites, could make for a highly desirable piece of career capital.
An online ‘quick and dirty’ version could be coded for email marketers and telemarketers that could be conducted in a distributed fashion in the likeness of coding competitions. But, a large scale, potentially TV-friendly could be much more profitable.
There’s an EA aspect to this too. Rationalisation of sales human resources may make Effective Altruism fundraising more quantified. And, with the birth of this idea here - the earliest competitions, or the non-profit ones could be ‘selling’ those GiveWell recommended charities as options for prospective donors. Major League Fundraising/Philanthropy! The same could be said about politics - if this become ubiquitous, voters could try to adjust their interpretations of the policy-offerings of politicans by their sales ability.
I reckon there could even be ‘team sales’. People might barrack for particular sales team’s their affiliated with - Say the Farmers Marketing Cooperatve of California (made up name) may consist of 10 members, but be supported by hundreds of farmers. Then, when it comes to a competition, say to raise money for Development Media International, one of GiveWell’s charities, people would support them like a sports team. Imagine that, people caring as much about charity as sports teams, or their online gaming leagues! In a sense, this is the gamification of sales.
If you have read this till here, you are the kind of person I want to help me build this. Please do get in touch, preferably publically as a comment here and privately (yes, twice! Once for people to know who’s involved, and twice for contact details which you may prefer not to publicly disclose) with a contact email address so I can keep everyone involved in the loop and we can decide upon a work cycle.
Equity split for founding team, including myself will be by negotiation among all of us. I forsee an equal split of total equity - an equal partnerships, for those involved.