Sales and Cancel Culture

The cancel culture debate has taken up a lot of oxygen in the US, and today Red discusses Gina Carano and Dr. Suess being "canceled" and how to look at it from a sales and business perspective. 

For more information and training blogs go to brokensalespeople.com 

Transcript

Hey, broken salespeople. So today I'm going to talk about canceled culture. Don't worry, it won't be as political as you think. That's on this episode of the broken salespeople podcast.
Hey, broken salespeople. Welcome to the workshop. My name is Red Stafstrom. And we're here to fix your broken sales skills. I want to do a slightly different episode today. I don't like really wading into politics very much. But based on the prevalence of these discussions, I feel like I need to offer a perspective. Based on how loud the argument is, I wanted to offer a different direction than most people do. kancil culture the idea that somebody who said something offensive, could you lose their livelihood can lose the rights to certain things. This has become a big hot button issue in the United States, particularly. But it's happened all over the globe, there is been a lot of discussion about canceled culture and how sensitive should we be to certain groups, certain ideas, certain thought process. That's not for me to decide, of all the discussions. To be quite frank, I am not part of any of the offended parties in most discussions of canceled culture. I am not a minority, I am not a lgtbq LGBTQ. I am not the person who deserves a say in terms of whether something is offensive or not. My opinion, I am not the one who's generally offended by it. So as somebody who is not generally offended, I'd have no say over what is offensive, if that makes sense. So I don't want to go down that road. I don't want to say what is and isn't allowed. I want to explain it from a business perspective. So I want to talk about two of the high profile ones of the last week or two. Dr. Seuss, and Gina Carano. Those are probably the two that are getting the most oxygen right now. Dr. Seuss, the publisher behind Dr. Seuss, decided to pull the plug on six of the books that Dr. Seuss wrote, most of them are lesser known, probably the most popular of the ones that I've seen that were canceled is so I saw it on Mulberry Street. The others were lesser known. But that was probably the most famous of the six. It wasn't Cat in the Hat. It wasn't Fox and socks. It wasn't green eggs and ham. It was lesser known books that were cancelled, quote unquote. Gina Carano was fired from Disney from her her acting gig and I couldn't think of the word for it. For her job on the Mandalorian. I'm a fan of the Mandalorian. I think she did an excellent job on the show. None of that has anything else to do with another thing. I'm a fan. I liked her performance. She did a very good job on the show.
So let's talk about those two things. Let's talk about Dr. Seuss, and canceled culture. Let's talk about Gina Carano. And let's talk about what it means for businesses and for sales. Because that's something for you to understand overall, as we talk about these things. I don't want to be the arbiter. I am not here to tell you what's right and what's wrong. I just want to talk about a direction of it that I don't see much getting much airtime. So both Dr. Seuss and Disney have a very similar demographic in terms of the ideal customer they want to work with. No, it's not kids. That's a general misconception. Dr. Seuss does not want to sell books to kids. Disney does not want to sell Disney tickets to kids. They want to sell them to young adults, they want to sell them to new parents aged 25 to 35. If they were to pick their ideal customer, their ideal market for their book. It is generally young parents, one to two kids between ages 25 and 35. That is how they're going after. We've talked a lot on this show about having a customer avatar, knowing the exact kind of person you want to talk to. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably either my Ryan or my Jess Just for me is a young female entrepreneur, starting her business but is started out knowing what she wants to do is very technical. It's an expert in her field, but doesn't really know the sales side of it yet. Ryan is a fairly new sales person. He's been in it for a couple of years, thought he was doing well, but he doesn't feel like he's able to jump to that next level, he feels like something about the advice he's been getting is wrong. Those are my two ideal customers. Those are the customer avatars that I have in my head. Both of them are great. But that's who I am aiming for. Those are the kinds of people I want to talk to my Ryan and my Jess. Now think about Disney. Think about Dr. Seuss. Well, Dr. Seuss isn't a state. Obviously, Theodore Geisel isn't a part of it anymore. Who are they really going after? young parents, they want people who have an income to actually buy the books for their kids. They want to have those parents take their kids to Disneyland and spend $3,000 at a resort. They don't just want that $14 membership to Disney plus, their ideas are much more grandiose than that. They have that ideal customer avatar. Now start picturing that person in your head. Think about from the Disney perspective. Who do you want? You want middle to upper class? young families? Probably making 70k plus a year from on US dollars. Who do you think how do you think they vote? They're probably college educated, which tends to skew more liberal. They're also young and grew up with people who may be LGBTQ, they've probably grown up in neighborhoods or gone to school with people of various different backgrounds. How do you think they respond to insensitive images, insensitive comments, whether it's offensive again, it's not for me to decide. But that wasn't taken well. I'm willing to go that far. By canceling both the Theodore Geisel estate and Disney have actually cemented their place with their ideal demographic. See, we can argue what's right and what's wrong. But we don't do that for most business decisions. We're willing to mark off Oh, it's just a business when 10s of 1000s of people get laid off. But when a single person gets fired, it's a tragedy. You realize the problem with that right? 10s of 1000 people get laid off. Oh, the business was slow. There were cutbacks. Well, it's just business kid. Oh, but Gina got fired. Oh my god, let's bring out the pitchforks. No, it's not like that. I'm not saying Gina was right. I'm not saying she was wrong. I don't agree with her stances. But she was very competent at her job, she did a very good job. I'm the Mandalorian. I am a fan.
But her stance is what she said, was starting to alienate Disney from the people that Disney wanted to reach out to. As a salesperson, you need to know this. Sometimes, you do have to take a stand. And when you do it, you need to be strategic about who you're trying to reach. Who are you trying to work with, because that will help cement what they believe in what you believe together, they will like you more, not just for what you sell and how you sell it. But for what you believe in Simon Sinek talks about starting with why getting people excited about why you do what you do, not just what you do. That's what Disney did. And I cannot fault them for following their why in furtherance of speaking to their ideal customer, I understand that that was their business decision to make. And to be honest, I kind of agree with it. Because if they didn't do that they would alienate their own demographic. Now from a society wide basis, is that the right thing to do? I don't know. But it was the right decision for Disney. And that's the only thing I can do. I can't arbitrate every decision as if it's not in I can like talk about one in a vacuum. And we can go from there. Some of you won't like this episode and I am perfectly okay with that. I want to explain it from a direction that I haven't seen yet much oxygen because I feel like without saying this without talking about it from the business person. spective and talk about it from an ideal customer avatar perspective. It's getting lost, we need to think about it as if we were Disney as if we were the Susa state. Because that's the people who got to make the decision. And if you don't like people getting canceled, then build the business that you get to make those decisions for yourself. That's what I invite all of you to do. It's what I challenge all of you to do. If you don't like the way business is being run, change things one business one decision at a time. So I know this episode was a little bit different. Please take the time to like to subscribe. I'm not subscribed any more than just get starting to get rid of that but take the time to review. It really helps the channel out. And until next time, please go fix yourself.