Potty Training Prospects

April 5th, 2010

I’m sorry but I giggled out loud when this title came to me.  Potty training prospects, are you serious Aaron?  Well….kind of.

One of my favorite Sandler rules is “Your meter is always running.” When I am at home with the family I can stop thinking about work for the most part but the piece that drives my wife crazy is the correlation to everything in sales. Here is what I mean….just last week we hit a milestone at the Prickel-household, our soon to be 3 year old son is finally potty trained.  This did not come easy for us, we tried on 2-3 separate occasions to potty train him and it failed causing us to question what we were doing wrong.  We tried various methods that worked for our close family and friends (reward method, set timer method etc) with no luck.

We took a break from trying and then something happened.  His younger sister who is 7 months moved into a bigger size of diapers (FYI-these new diapers look identical to the ones he is used to wearing).  The first day we are changing her with her new diapers and he throws a fit, my wife calmly says “If you don’t want to be like her just stop wearing diapers.”  POOF, potty training complete.

My warped mind immediately went into “sales correlation mode.”  We tried methods that worked for others and were upset when they didn’t work for him.  This is like the prospect that you are talking with and trying the reward method (you can save X with this product/service), sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Maybe this prospect isn’t motivated by reward or loss, maybe their true motivation is they just don’t want to be like anyone else and your product/service can help differentiate them.  It is hard to ask a toddler how to motivate them to potty train them but it shouldn’t be hard to ask a prospect what would actually motivate them to purchase your product or service!

Aaron Prickel

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