Help wanted. Selling ice to Eskimos

You see ice huts, seals and fur coats. I see a village of people who want to buy some ice.

Welcome to the truest test of a salesperson, selling ice to an Eskimo.

You have a huge quota and the company has big expectations of you. If you succeed the company releases your family from the Thunder Dome Fighting pit. If you fail not only do you go in, but you will be pitted against Grandma. 

She’s got a score to settle and her weapon of choice is the chain saw.

(movie I’m thinking about writing)

This is the best advice I can offer you about selling ice to Eskimos. It’s also the last thing you remember before I pushed you out of the airplane. (with parachute) (roll opening credits with exciting James Bond ‘like’ title sequence and catchy jingle).

The Eskimos have lots of words to describe every iteration of snow and ice. It’s their freezing currency.

You need to understand what’s the good snow and why

How does it affect their time and their personal relationships. What is ‘bad’ about the bad types of snow, ice and so on.

They need to tell you how their life would improve with the good stuff.

Ice is the tangible. Improvement in life is the intangible

Intangibles are always priced optimistically and the consumer accepts this. Its a fair exchange, I will pay you more and what you sell is better.

Better is not the tangible. Your competitors sell adequate snow and ice and their price is lower. Tangibles are algebraic.

Intangibles are physics.

Its not about the ice, Its about the improvement in their relationships. More time with friends and family, less stress, the effect the improvements have on others, their families, their time. The other Eskimos clans don’t have the good ice. That gives the good ice/snow Eskimos a social and status advantage. Perhaps they can use this to woo other Eskimos, to retain the loyalties of their own clan and to increase commerce.

A sale of the good ice can never happen until the prospect Eskimo tells us why they want it.

We have to have competitors so we can discuss the differences in our product, what makes us better and merits a higher price. If they want the low quality stuff, the compromises aren’t in the tangibles, it’s in the intangibles.

We need the prospect Eskimo to have a new column in their ice vendor spreadsheet. That column is the improvement in their life, their status amongst their peers, their personal status and that of their tribe.

The end?