Sales Success Key #9 -- Memetic Mastery

The best salespeople are what I would call natural ‘memeticists’. They package ideas and spread them like mad.

The system of thought that explains how ideas spread is called “memetics”. Thinkers in that field (e.g., Dawkins, Hofstadter, Dennett) use the word ‘meme’ to refer to an “idea that spreads”.

Salespeople “position” their products and their pricing. A position statement is a meme. Leaders provide followers with a “frame” or view of how to see a situation. A frame is a meme. Slogans are memes. Memes are, well, memes (after all, we both know that, as of at least now, they’ve spread all the way to your awareness).

Genes are to genetics, as memes are to memetics. Genes are not fussy about whose genes they get paired up with (intra-species, at least); any genetic pattern will do. They just want to reproduce. Neither are memes fussy. And they too just want to reproduce.

Yup, ideas spread, especially when they’re nicely packaged and exposed to lots of people.

For example, you don’t want your kids introduced to drugs or sex or, darn it, even rock and roll, because even exposing them to the notion might start them on a path of no return. You KNOW those particular memes are nasty. On the other hand, surely you’ve packaged up a few favourable memes for the kids around you: “do a good deed for somebody every day”, or “let’s use our 'inside voices' please!”. Just this morning I heard someone at my office spread a client’s meme: “profitable volume”. Memes are everywhere.

Salespeople are one medium through which (hopefully) commercial memes spread. Really good salespeople spread memes like wildfire via the frequency, consistency, clarity, and allure of their utterances.

When you’ve come up with the right response to a price objection, and it seems to work for you, you’ve created a meme. When you and your colleagues say it again and again, it jumps from person to person and thereby reproduces itself — customers believe it and they even learn to justify your price to others.

When a customer is playing “hard to get” (that’s a meme), highly skilled salespeople know the most powerful response (another meme). When a customer complaint scenario arises, it too is a meme. And there is undoubtedly a series of memes to deal with it. “Been there, done that”.

So why are some salespeople better at meme spreading than others? The best salespeople seek, practice and master the phrases that work, the conversation steps that push the right buttons, the responses to challenges, the multitude of magnificent memetic maneuvers that make merriment and money for the masses. Mmmm good. That’s what Campbell’s soups are.