Pulling Out All the Stops
I was lucky enough to be invited together with my son to an organ recital recently. It was a casual affair where you grabbed a tea and some cake and sat down for the recital cabaret style.
We turned up a little late and there were no tables left. All that was left was a row of seats about 10 feet – 3 metres my continental chums – directly behind the organist and his assistant. This afforded us an amazing view of all the work they had to do to pull off the rendition. There were three keyboard rows, a couple dozen pedals, and music papers everywhere that marked which organ stops had to be out for which piece of music. The more stops you have out – presumably; I’m no musician – the greater the range of different sound effects.
This got me thinking of the phrase ‘pulling out all the stops’ and how it relates to business. Pulling out all the stops means marshalling all the resources in your command and doing everything in your power to achieve something. If you’re in sales, there should only be one person you’re pulling out all the stops for. It’s not you, and it’s not your boss. It’s your customer.
I know that sounds contradictory, but if you’re rooting for your customer and you’re their biggest advocate in your company, you will win big in the long run.
As a postscript, I accidentally published this post before the due date and a disappointed reader, met with a 404, sagely opined that perhaps I had pulled out too many stops. This is also true, you can pull out too many stops and put too much effort in for a sales opportunity. You need to balance the investment-reward equation.
Paul Dilger's blog 
I DID think, Paul, that “error 404” was perhaps your shortest and most uninteresting post to date. More a case of you ‘not pulling out ANY stops’, that might have been?!
But no, an interesting point in the REAL blog. Our recently retired sales guy was often chastised — by those that were charged with turning his orders into a reality — for pulling out WAY TOO MANY stops for the customer, making promises that we couldn’t keep, or that would use up so much resource as to make some projects dangerously unprofitable.
I’m not sure it’s enough to give free reign to a salesperson to win orders ‘at all costs’. He or she must be mindful of the amount of GP that gets nibbled away by the real Cost of all that stop out-pulling.
I think, now, that maybe you meant more in terms of the effort applied, rather than the amount freely given, in which case I agree with your sentiment 100%!
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Andy, thanks for your comment. At first I read it as ‘your shortest and most interesting post to date’ which was probably closer to the truth…I totally agree with you that selling what you don’t have is the path to a whole bunch of bad places. That’s not doing you or your customer any favours. Nor should you be given free reign to discount willy nilly. The last thing you should be moving on is price if there is a good fit and you are uniquely capable of helping the customer meet their needs. What you absolutely have to do, and be prepared to do, is go to bat for your customer. You are the person who should be making sure the equilibrium is there, and the deal is good for both parties. This is because the impact on your customer of a bad buying decision is always worse than the loss to you of a deal.
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Hey Paul, still on the subject of the ‘error 404’, Phillippa found this great little TED Talk about such pages, and how they’re possibly an under-used sales resource, or a way to extend the customer experience. I think you’ll love it:
Enjoy!
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Thanks Andy and Phillippa, that’s a great talk. It’s given me a few ideas for my own website 🙂
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Short too, under my personal threshold of 5 mins…
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