I am a huge fan of watching movies, this is now my second blog post about a movie. But I have recently watched the movie Blackberry, and I thought it was a perfect example of sales in movies. The movie is about the CEO of Blackberry, Mike Lazaridis, and how he was able to build one of the biggest cell phone companies in the past decade. The movie depicts how Lazaridis was just a small company and was able to gain attention from big CEOs that wanted to sell his phone. The movie shows how Blackberry was able to do a lot of sales in a short amount of time.
A big turning point in the movie is gaining the attention of Jim Balsillie. Balsillie listened to their pitch and initially turned Blackberry down. After he was fired from his job, Jim offered to invest and be the CEO of Blackberry. Lazaridis made him Co-Ceo and they went into business with each other. Lazaridis and Balsillie made a good sales duo because Lazaridis knew the product and could talk about the specs and information about the phone, while Balsillie was able to find the pain point in the potential buyers. A scene that stands out to me from the movie was when the CEO Carl Yankowski tried to do a hostile takeover of Blackberry. Balsillie wasn’t going to let that happen so he decided to make the whole Blackberry team salesmen. He had them go around to country clubs, pools, tennis courts, malls, and other places where people would see them and Balsillie had the salesmen make a big deal about being on their Blackberry. This tactic worked and they avoided the takeover.
Even though this movie is about the rise and fall of Blackberry, I thought it showed some sales tactics in an interesting way. Jim Balsillie was by no means a great person but he sure was able to sell Blackberries. I recommend this movie to anyone who is interested in Blackberry and how they were able to sell so many phones in the early stages of their company.
BoweryJE22