Urgent Sales vs Important Relationships

This week’s brutal news that hundreds of workers are being laid off from their jobs at Stelco underscores the terrible mistake Canadians are making in the way we are framing the tariff debate.

Media reports tend to position the situation as “Canada versus America.” In some speeches, Mark Carney presents a “North America versus Europe” choice to be made.

Pierre Poilievre is more likely to describe the difference as being between a “Conservative versus Liberal” approach.

Doug Ford has insisted on making it a “Republican versus Democrat” issue, going so far as to running an advertisement originally created by the Chinese Communist Party to warn Americans they’d better vote Democrat. Ford actually says out loud, while cameras roll, that he hopes the Democrats win the mid-term elections.

Of course, the standard and most consistent approach politicians and pundits use to frame the current conversation is a “Donald Trump versus the World” conflict.

I suggest Canadians would be much better off if our  thought processes and language choice could evolve in the face of family-crushing layoffs.  Let’s stop talking about political promises, and start talking about SALES.

Watching the Canada/U.S. trade debacle brings to mind the black-and-while, rubber-meets-the-road experience of a Monday Morning Sales Meeting. Anyone who has ever endured the agony and the ecstasy of a real Sales meeting is laughing at the dodgy language Mark Carney  uses.

Even before he started dangling ephemeral concepts like a “unique alliance” and “deeper partnership” as we are “pursuing resilience” with the European Union, he was consoling Canadians by assuring them they could count on “shared values;” “new opportunities” and things like commitments, arrangements, and understandings.

This feel-good fuzzy language demonstrates the clear difference between Sales, which is described using simple numbers, and Politics, which uses an infinite amount of words in the effort to avoid using any numbers at all.

In a weekly Sales Meeting there is one number that matters and that is the total amount of Sales you closed the preceding week. And by “Sales,” I mean product or service ordered (or even better, actually already DELIVERED), for which funds have either already been transferred or are now due as Accounts Receivable (the other number that matters in a Sales Meeting).

I’ve worked as a sales professional. I got paid to SELL. Not to organize, or solicit commitments, or create arrangements, or design accords, or extract promises. I did not get paid to pursue deeper relationships.  I got paid to close sales.

I remember waiting on the floor of a factory one Friday afternoon for the man who had just “committed” to a $4000 purchase to go get me a VISA number. He left and came back three times, each time with a new promise of “my boss will be back after lunch,” “the guy I need is on holidays,” and “I can get this for you next week, for sure.”

“I’m sure you can get it today. I have all afternoon; I can wait till your boss gets back. We can’t do this tomorrow.”

An hour or so later, he came back with the VISA number, which was processed uneventfully and everyone was happy at the end of the day. At the Monday Morning Sales Meeting, I received applause and congratulations for my persistence in closing the deal and bringing in the money.

At another meeting, I had to report that I had failed to close the deal with the owner of a chain of auto repair centres on a purchase we had been negotiating all summer. My failure to close this sale meant not only that my own sales figures were decimated, but an entire fall program which depended on this sale had to be postponed. Ouch

My co-workers who had sales dependent on that program were livid with me about my failure; no one was comforted by the fact that I was forging a unique relationship. They were going to be out MONEY.

Canadians are going to be out a lot of money if the government we elected cannot finalize a trade deal with the United States of America. Sure, we may mourn the loss of our unique relationship and our failure to establish deeper ties with our American neighbours.

But the real pain will be felt when Canadians realize without the money from those sales, mortgages cannot be paid and groceries cannot be bought. Banks start charging fees for non-sufficient funds and utility companies start calling on the phone to demand payment. You get to tell your kids that hockey sign-ups or summer camps got cancelled.

A lot of cold, hard cash pours over the 49^th parallel from the U.S. into Canada. It pays for a big chunk of the happy life we live in the Great White North. It’s great to share values with the Europeans, but that won’t replace the cashflow we share with Americans. The promise of a sale in Europe a decade from now will do absolutely nothing to help a laid-off Stelco worker whose mortgage is due today.

None of this is to take away the fact that there is value in building unique and deeper relationships with new clients and potential customers. That is an important but not urgent activity.

What is both important and urgent, however, is closing the sales with customers already in hand so that cash keeps flowing while these new longer-term accounts are established. A bird in the hand is still worth two in bush. And also, cutting off your nose to spite your face still hurts. A lot.

 So, just as a reminder, cash in hand or money in the bank counts as a “sale.” Canada sells a lot to America.

Flowery phrases from European bureaucrats are not  “sales.”