Back in the prehistoric days of my sales career, I sat at a table with some pretty remarkable sales leaders. We talked shop and did our best with our one uppery.
You could have cut the testosterone with a knife!
Now this is the part where you will agree to my intentional use of the word “prehistoric”.
One of my fellow sales compadres pulls out an alpha pager (I just said that out loud) and reads that bad boy the second it goes off. Within seconds, there’s a big ear to ear grin, he turns the pager around for us to see the message and he says
“Gentlemen. It says ‘back up the truck’ Which means we just made another sale” and he went on to give us some dollar amounts.
He explained that everyone on his team gets a message like that whenever they score a win.
I thought it might be cool to implement that with my team but didn’t want to rip off the dude’s battle cry.
So, I thought long and hard and just couldn’t think of anything until participating in some crazy events that followed.
Several of us went out after dinner and were smoking cigars (manly man style) at a local high end bar.
After what seemed like a short visit, my Operations Manager comes over to me and says “We have to get the hell out of here”
So I did the admirable thing and blew smoke in his face and said “You get the hell out of here. I’m having fun”
He then says “Seriously dude. We need to go now. Look” and he points to the “Back up the truck dude” who now has a big ass hole burned in his shirt because my Ops Manager wasn’t paying attention where he was holding his cigar.
Note: I must say it was a magnificent hole and it was still smoking.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that since this guy worked for me, that somehow I was about to get dragged into a brawl.
Actually, that’s not entirely true I meant to say
It doesn’t take a genius to realize I would have gotten dragged into the brawl when I couldn’t stop laughing at the smoldering hole in his shirt. I still think its funny.
So we boogied out of there and then something happened the next morning that changed the course events for my sales team.
I’m sitting down at Breakfast with the same group from last night (Yep I can’t leave stuff alone) We all go through the mandatory “How are you todays” which quite frankly should be illegal after a night of partying because you know damn well how I’m doing. You were there dude!
I noticed the “back up the truck” dude wasn’t so chipper. Then someone has to ask him point blank. “How are you today” I stared at my scrambled eggs and braced myself for the impending sh*t storm.
Then it happened. He spoke the following words, slowly and deliberately as if to etch them in a future balding sales jedi’s mind.
“Well I’m OK except some son of a bitch burned a hole in my shirt”
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
In fact I don’t even remember what transpired next at the table because I found our battle cry.
“Burn another shirt!”
Stylish, elegant, funny.
So whenever we would score any win, no matter how big, or how small . . .
Our crazy battle cry would go out
The congrats would pour in
The ata boys and ata girls
Even some friendly competitive responses like “Savor the flavor dude by 5:00 today I’ll top that deal”
The rest is really history because our Mojo was back and we broke sales record after sales record.
This story and the phrase are just silly ways to invite you to:
Celebrate your wins by acknowledging them publicly as in champagne in the locker room style.
It costs you nothing to stroke an ego and you might just ignite that performance culture that needs a little love!
Now get out of here and find your own way to burn another shirt dude! 🙂
