This weekend I was not looking for examples of sales as I hung out with friends, but I found multiple as a group of us were watching Ocean’s Eleven. This heist movie involves moving much more than just the money they steal. Multiple times throughout the movie, different characters convince others to do things. These situations are perfect examples of selling in action.
Early in the movie, there is an example of non-sales selling. Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan travel around and recruit nine other men for the biggest heist in history. To do this, they had to convince their prospects to join the team. There is a longer scene of Rusty talking with the old timer Saul Bloom. Rusty finds Saul at a race. There is not much talking, but through giving Saul box seats and asking a few specific questions, Rusty has him convinced to join the team. He does not close the sale directly but walks away and lets Saul think about the decision more.
The second example of sales principles in practice was in the middle of the movie. The character Frank Catton was purchasing a white van from a car salesman. This was a very typical car sales scene you would see in movies. However, there were some very interesting things I noticed in the conversation. The control of the conversation was completely in Frank’s hands. In class we have mentioned that shutting up and listening can be a helpful approach to staying in control, but Frank does not apply this tactic. As the customer, he goes on a rant about an unrelated topic to distract the car salesman while intimidates him into reducing the price of the van. With an extremely strong handshake, the price of the van is reduced from what the salesman originally said he couldn’t go under.
I really enjoyed noticing new nuances about movie scenes that involve sales. It was cool to see things that we have talked about in class in each situation.
BoweryJE22
I really liked how you wrapped this idea around the movie ocean eleven. It is interesting that a lot of things we experience have to do with sales. Prospecting is the most important thing to do in sales, Without prospecting, there are no leads, if there are no leads, there are no sales done. Just like the movie, the prospects that needed to join the tream, was so important otherwise the heist was never to be done. Great Post!
It is always fun to look for classroom learnings in movies. I appreciate when professors play film or television clips in class to help students comprehend the material. Like when Professor Sweet plays clips from The Office in class.
I think it is really cool that you tied in the movie Oceans Eleven. Watching the movie before this class would just be a normal movie. After you can see all the sales and entrepreneurship that goes on.
Ocean’s 11 is one of my favorite movies, but I have never noticed these examples of non-sales selling. I think the examples of Danny Ocean and Rusty convincing others to join their team is a type of non-sales selling we engage in all the time. How often do we try to convince our friends to do things with us or our parents to let us go on a trip or for our professors to move an assignment? I think now that we’ve learned some sales principles, we will be able to notice more examples of people engaging in non-sales selling in our day to day lives.
Ocean’s Eleven is top-tier tier and when we watched the Bumblebee car sales pitch I immediately went to when Frank squeezing the car salesman’s hand. This is a fun way to bring what we are learning in class to life.
I love Oceans 11 (like many in the comments) and love the aspects like gathering the crew for sales, it seems completely obvious now that I look back at the movie and that is a good indicator of how on point this take actually is.