https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eBxLaWijJn8
This was cool too. Horrible, but cool. So imagine a large corporation and you go in and you try to make a sales pitch to someone, and maybe they’re in HR. And you say to them, look, you could use these tests, if you use it for a hundred people, we’ll increase your bottom line by two million dollars a year. You’d think people would be jumping up and down about that. And they say, well, how much does it cost? And we say, well, it doesn’t matter, because the cost to benefit ratio is what you should care about, not the cost. Because they would want it, say, for nine dollars a test. It was like, no. If you do this for each, and I’ll show you the mathematics in a bit, each person that you select with this test will bring twenty thousand dollars of extra value to your company. You’re not getting that for nine dollars. And then they say, well, wait a minute, we have a budget for testing that’s limited to nine dollars a test. They say, well, it’s going to produce thirty thousand dollars a year in revenue. They say, well, that revenue goes to another branch of the company and we won’t get any credit for it. We’ll just get punished because we’ve exceeded our budget for selection. I thought, oh yeah, never expected that to come up as an obstacle. So, you know, so we had very well designed products. They also took about 90 minutes because we started with a full scale neuropsychological assessment. So we took tests of dorsolateral prefrontal cortical ability, which had before that been administered by neuropsychologists, and we computerized them. We did that back in 1993. So it was among the first attempts to do this sort of thing. And then we had a 90 minute test battery that also assessed the big five. And then you could give that to employees and, you know, you could you could produce this 80 20 differential that I described. And well, then we found out, well, the test was too long. It’s like, well, what do you mean? You’re going to gain thirty thousand dollars a year per employee if you use this test. It’s like, no, people don’t want to be tested that long. It’s like, OK, so you want an accurate test that doesn’t discriminate against anybody, that makes everyone feel good, that’s dirt cheap and that doesn’t take any time at all. It’s like, well, it took us about 15 years to build one of those after we had built the original thing that actually worked. And so even then, the process of trying to introduce it into the workplace was almost impossible. The other thing you find if you’re trying to sell to large companies, this is worth knowing, is that it’s great if you can sell to a large company because it’s a large company, man. And so you the potential for the sale is astronomical. But large companies are so slow, you cannot believe it. And so it might take you three years, first of all, you have to find who you should talk to. That’s impossible because all the people that you can talk to have no decision making power whatsoever. So all you do is waste your time talking to them. They’ll talk to you, they’ll have meetings with you, but it won’t matter because they don’t have any decision making power. And then you can’t get access to people who have the decision making power because they don’t let you have access to them. And so that’s a huge problem. And even figuring them out is a huge problem. And even figuring out that those are the people that you need to talk to is a huge problem. So that might take you five years just to get it through your head that you’re wasting your time, 95 percent of the time talking to the wrong people. And so then the next thing that happens, this is really, this is really comical. So let’s say you do make some headway. It takes you three bloody years. You’ve made a relationship with the person. They’re ready to launch it. And then they have to market it internally. And that takes them a year because they have to convince everybody to get on board. And then the corporation reshuffles and the person that you’re dealing with disappears. It’s like that happened to us. We were marketing to a very large company. We would got all the way up to the CEO and ready to. This was with the future authoring program. And we were ready to launch the damn product. It took us a huge amount of time to get through all the layers. And just the week that we were going to launch it, the CEO resigned and the company stock crashed. And that was the end of that. Bang. And and large companies are like that. Like they’re extremely slow. And the typical duration that a person lasts in a given position. And this is something to consider with regards to your careers is about four years. So you’ll occupy the position you’re in for about four years. And then, well, you’ll either fail out, you’ll move laterally or you’ll move up. And so it’s a three year sales cycle minimum. And that’s interweaved with the possibility that whoever you’re talking to is just going to disappear. And then if you sell to small companies, well, they’re faster but they don’t have any money. So that’s not very helpful. So it’s extraordinarily difficult even if you produce something of high value. And that you have proof that the thing exists. It’s extraordinarily difficult to sell it.