{"id":626,"date":"2015-03-05T04:53:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-05T04:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/?p=626"},"modified":"2015-03-05T05:41:08","modified_gmt":"2015-03-05T05:41:08","slug":"the-keebler-elf-salesman-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/the-keebler-elf-salesman-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"The Keebler Elf \u2013 Salesman of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Lagerquist household, setting foot (or ski) on the slopes of Boyce Park was an important rite of passage.\u00a0 When you were five or so (or as soon as the kid one spot older than you mastered the art of skiing solo), Dad would take you along for an evening of skiing at Boyce Park.\u00a0 At that age, four hours of attempting to balance while Dad skied backwards and held you up was enough of a challenge \u2013 we couldn\u2019t even imagine going for days on end.<\/p>\n

\"Cookies\"<\/a>But other than getting to ride the plate lift and spend a night with Dad, skiing at Boyce promised another special treat \u2013 hot chocolate and Keebler cookies half way through the evening.\u00a0 Although we loved the outing, I\u2019d be lying if I said that the special Keebler cookies didn\u2019t help sell us on the adventure.\u00a0 We knew that even if our fingers were freezing in our mittens or we just wanted to sit down and sled on our skis, we had to put forth good effort to earn that special treat in the ski lodge.<\/p>\n

In class we\u2019ve been talking a lot about how hard it is to find the real pain that customers are feeling so we can sell them the product in the most effective way.\u00a0 I highly doubt that any salesman could have figured out that the best way to get the Lagerquist kids to endure cold
\nfingers and ski all evening would be to let them eat Keebler cookies in the ski lodge halfway through without really listening to us talk about our experiences first.<\/p>\n

So I guess the point I\u2019m trying to make here is that as a salesman, you can\u2019t just assume that \"Skiing\"you understand the pain points and drivers in each situation unless you take the time to not
\nonly listen, but actually digest what your customer is saying and see the experience from their perspective.\u00a0 A night on the slopes with his kids was enough to motivate my dad to go through all the hoopla of dragging us all out there, outfitting us with gear, and listening to all the \u2018I\u2019m sooo cold!\u2019 complaints.\u00a0 But for myself, Elsa, Karsten, and Britta, we sure needed that Keebler Elf too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Lagerquist household, setting foot (or ski) on the slopes of Boyce Park was an important rite of passage.\u00a0 When you were five or so (or as soon as the kid one spot older than you mastered the art of skiing solo), Dad would take you along for an evening of skiing at Boyce […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":629,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions\/629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}