Business screen magazine (1946)

paradox BY STANFORD SOBEL Paradox: The setret of a successful sales meeting b> precision preplanning, so that you can b« prepared for everj eventuality. BUT ... it is the totally unpredictable developments which most seriously threaten a sales meeting, and because they are unpredictable, it is almost impossible to be prepared in advance for them. Readers, this column is being written outside a poolside cabana at one of Miami Beaches lushest convention hotels. Your columnist is in his colorful bathing trunks, having just done a few laps in the Olympic Size Salt Water Swimming Pool. A tall, frosty libation sits next to my portable typewriter. And in a couple of hours I will be jetting home to the frigid north after an enormously successful sales meeting in the tropical sunshine. Idyllic? Groovy? Attractive? Are you jealous? Save your envy, Friends, for more important situations. Before you gnash your teeth in jealous rage, before your hackles rise at the indignity of your having to cope with the cold and slushy streets outside your door on your way to the antiseptic bleakness of your office, let me fill in the rest of the picture for you. Judge not by appearances, Friends. Although the picture is idyllic now, there were times during the last week when we skirted disaster so narrowly that a fiasco seemed to be knocking on every one of the 1500 doors in the place. For example, one night will be forever etched in my memory in cold steel as "the night we cut out the General Manager". It seems that there was a boat ride that night from six to nine, with cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, beer, dinner, and brandy. We then began rehearsing at 9:30 p.m. Nobody can remember exactly how it happened, (and that's no surprise!) but we seemed to be running too long during rehearsal so we began cutting, editing, and shifting people's program positions around. In the course of doing this we eliminated the general manager's philosophical summary of the significance of the four day sales meeting This morning, during the coffee break, we quietly put it back in, so serreptitiously and efficiently, nobody would ever have known it had been cut out. Eliminating the man who gave you the job in the first place is not the smartest thing you will ever do at a sales meeting. Let me say that I'm keeping all names confidential here, not so much to protect the innocent, as to make an obvious point . . . The things that happened to us could happen to anyone, not exclusively to those involved in this particular enterprise. Another thing . . . although I'm sitting in the sunshine now . . . I'm only doing it so that I can say that I did it. Actually, during the last seven days, the only time I have seen the sun has been at seven a.m. on my way to breakfast, when I detoured from the inside halls to make a determined inspection of the outside of the hotel, the ocean, and the beach. All the rest of the time, with one brief exception I will tell you about later, I have been either in a rehearsal room, coaching speakers, or in the "main tent" room, rehearsing speakers against their visuals, or at an actual performance. We would occasionally get a report that it was a beautiful day, but you couldn't prove it by me. Readers. But I am only explaining, not complaining. As we say in the booklet we hand out to the sales force . . . the secret of a good meeting is good preparation . . . rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing . . . and we practiced what we preach. The complexities of a four day sales meeting arc awe-inspiring, from almost every angle. For example . . . counting all the transitions, introductions, bridges, and speeches, there are some 43 verbal presentations in this meeting, involving some 19 different speakers. In most cases the cUent wrote a first draft, and 1 edited the first draft, and he edited my revisions, and the art director then edited the client's revisions of my revisions of the client's first draft, in order to fit the visuals to the copy. In some cases I wrote the first drafts, which then followed the same route as the first flow chart described above. Needless to say, we were making minor changes in wording on practically every one of these speeches up to the time it went on in front of the audience, and for these last minute revisions we used a public stenographer, the hotel's copy machine, and my own poor battered Italian portable. In addition to the speeches, we had an engineering movie, an advertising movie, two sales training movies, two service-training filmstrips, a promotional kinescope transfer from a videotape, several outside speakers, the vice-president of a TV network, the president of a publishing house, about 5,000 super-slides, five meeting modules, a daily illustrated newspaper, and nobody knows how many feet of audio and music tapes. In the production of the audiovisuals listed above, there were many active individuals and organizations. Writers, producers, directors, projectionists sound men. an ad agency, a P.R. agency, three photographic agencies, four printers, five different film producers, and a total of eleven different laboratories. For some mysterious reason never completely understood by me. Continued on next page DECEMBER, 1970 19