Media is to Fuel as the Recession is to Fire – How Does it Impact the Sales Force?

The media – they didn’t cause the banking crisis but they have surely capitalized on it, dramatized it, chronically reported every devastating development and turned a serious but contained fire into a wildfire.

I don’t want to hear how many jobs have been lost.  Who does that help?  I don’t want to hear what happened to the Dow – I can look it up if I want to know how much money I lost.  I don’t want to hear who is going into bankruptcy.  It doesn’t affect me.  I don’t want to know the latest store closings, whose sales are off for the quarter, how lousy the auto makers are doing or whose house is being foreclosed.  The point is, it doesn’t help me, it doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help anybody, anywhere, to listen to this never-ending, negative drama.  In fact, it hurts.  It depresses people, it scares people and it causes people to stop buying things. It is causing businesses to lay-off employees, not because they have to, but because they have an excuse to, and it’s causing people to wonder if it’s ever going to improve.

I don’t want to know who was murdered last night either.  And I don’t want to know who got killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. This doesn’t impact me either.

In fact, let’s roll the news back to just 30 minutes, let’s give the meteorologist and sports anchor a few more minutes, and let’s hear some news that is really news.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average isn’t news.  A company’s earnings shouldn’t be news.

Let’s hear about the good that companies are doing. Let’s hear about the good that people are doing.  Let’s hear about the things organizations are doing to improve our economy.  Let’s hear about the things being done to improve health care, the environment, our lives, our world, our universe.

Tell us about the latest developments in space, under water, in remote places.  Tell us something good.  Tell us something positive.  Tell us something to take our minds OFF of what’s going on and help us to put some normalcy back into our lives.

For those of us who consult, train, coach, evaluate and motivate executive teams and sales organizations, this would surely help us to help them.  We need to get people buying and nothing gets people buying like good salespeople who aren’t selling into the most resistant marketplace in the history of selling.

I will tell 250 sales development experts, 10,000 subscribers to Baseline Selling, and the thousands who visit this blog to boycott the news.  And if they each tell someone, who tells someone, who tells someone we could actually have an impact. How about calling this initiative something like 3M2P –  Media Motivating the Masses 2 Prosper?  Seriously, it’s not an initiative, it’s not an organization, it’s not more than one person’s frustration. But what if it was?

I’ve never asked for my articles to be forwarded but I think this is the one I have been saving that request for.  Please forward the link to anyone you think will agree with this.