What is money?
Sunday, February 8, 2009 1:25
Helmut Sutherland and Robert Jefferson famously teamed up and created a printing press. First they had plans to publish a newspaper because Mr. Jefferson knew how to write. It was only after second bounced check that they had an idea to print money. Mr. Sutherland knew how to draw and things took off from there. At this point of time, Mr. Jefferson has already left his world famous traveling carnival of freaks and focuses more on life in suburbia. Mr. Sutherland, however, will have some wonderful traveling still to do. His grave stone can be found on a green field at Margot island on the top of Landis.
BACKGROUND
I have followed almost heated discussion at John Chow. John is credit faithful who masters contrastive writing. Strong opinion over there and back comes equally strong reply. Discussion grows and in the eye of the storm John looks at all the links coming in and smiles. John says that credit cards are a good thing and people are able to treat cards just as they treat money, most of us anyway. He goes as far as to say that money is just to keeping score.
TO KEEP SCORE
Money is not only something to keep score. It is an important thing for a salesperson to know how differently people treat money. Some have strong opinions about debt and they avoid it so hard that it financially hurts them. Some people don’t care about tomorrow instead they want it today. Most are in the between acting differently today from what they did yesterday.
TO WANT MONEY
I was in a German shop couple of days ago. I overheard two young boys discussing, they had just returned some bottles and got some change for doing it. Their conversation went roughly like this:
-Hey, give me my ten euros.
-Ok wait, here you go.
-No! I don’t want two fivers, I want a note of ten euros.
-But I gave you ten euros.
-Yeah but I gave you a note of ten euros yesterday that was the starting point.
-Well, I can’t give you back that note, I used it yesterday.
-Yeah, I know, but I just want another note of ten euros…
That was pretty much their conversation after which they walked to cashier and changed two five euro notes into one ten euro note. After this procedure the other boy was content and they returned inside the shop to buy some candy. Ultimately boy used the note to pay so one might wonder why the fixation to first have the note like it was.
MONEY FOR SALES
My take on the above example is that we can’t accept loss. When we pay with money, we give away something. When we pay with card we get it back, simple as that. So back to the fact that it is important for people who work in sales to understand that the way we perceive money as private people also carries into our work life. Just like the tale of two boys, you might face surprising problems in closing a deal if you don’t know how the prospect deals with money.
