Advancing Your Career: Seven Career Lessons I Learned from Selling Ginsu Knives

by Jack Molisani | Fellow

This column addresses job hunting and career advancement, focusing on various aspects of career growth. It’s written from the perspective of someone who has been a technical writer, technical communication manager, and recruiter, who worked as a captive (full-time) employee and an independent contractor before finally starting his own company. If you have questions or suggestions for a future column, email them to jack@prospringstaffing.com with ”Career Question” in the subject line.

In the mid-1990s I was laid off from my full-time job as a sales engineer with a bank technology company. I spent months looking for a new engineering position, but no one was hiring.

At the time, a friend owned a franchise to place booths selling Ginsu knives into home and garden shows. One of her regular salespersons had to go out of town and asked if I could cover for the worker while she was gone. Sure, why not?, I thought. I could use the money.

They gave me a crash course in how to demonstrate Ginsu knives and sent me off to work a show. I did well—so well they invited me to work the home-and-garden show circuit for the rest of the summer.

When the economy began to recover, I still couldn’t find work as a sales engineer, but I was able to find work as a technical writer—a job I found I very much enjoyed.

It has been 15 years since that summer and I now have my own technical writing and staffing company, but I will always remember seven career lessons I learned from selling Ginsu knives:

1. Have a good product to sell.

Yes, Ginsu knives really can cut a hammer and then slice a tomato paper thin. To this day I still have a Ginsu knife in my kitchen for cutting bread, and one in the car for cutting radiator hoses. The product really works!

The lesson: Find a product or service that really works and sell it. (Or deliver it if someone else in your organization sells it.)

2. Stand behind your product.

Ginsu knives rarely get dull or break, but it does happen (especially when you use one to saw down a small tree). The knife’s lifetime guarantee says you can mail it back to the manufacturer or present the knife to any salesperson in the world and they will replace it for free, no questions asked. And they do!

The lesson: Stand behind your product and guarantee its quality.

3. Attract attention.

In pitchman lingo, your “tip” is the crowd that gathers to watch you demonstrate your product. The bigger the tip, the more people who will buy—not just in number of sales, but also in percentage of closes (more on this later).

Most people tend to ignore salespeople (or worse, go out of their way to avoid them). In the pitch business, people rarely walk up to a booth to see what you were selling. You have to attract their attention, call them over, be entertaining, be interesting.

The lesson: Customers rarely call just to buy your product or service. You have to find them. Use social media, live webinars, direct mail, anything you can think of to attract positive attention from your target audiences. You have to makes sales calls and contact people.

4. The closer your “tip” is to your “joint,” the more sales you will make.

As I said earlier, your “tip” is the group standing around your booth watching your sales pitch. (Or hanging around waiting for you to start if you work the room properly.) Your “joint” is the booth from which you are demonstrating your product. 

The closer people are to your joint, the more likely they are to buy. Most people, however, will stop about 10 feet away, cross their arms defensively, and watch from afar (interested but too timid to get closer).

I’ll let you in on a secret: Pitchmen know people are hesitant to walk up to sales people, so to get people to move closer (and thus more likely to buy), a pitchman might say, “Now I’m going to show how the knife really can cut a hammer, but the people in the back are going to have to move forward to see the shavings.”

The pitchman will then take three steps backward to make a comfortable space for the audience to move into as he motions them forward. But, once everyone has moved closer, the pitchman will take three steps forward again and be right there nose-to-nose with the tip and then continue the demonstration.

The lesson: Many people can’t confront a sales pitch right from the start, so have a way to get them involved first. Offer a free webinar, a podcast, a low-cost introductory service, etc. Then continue your main presentation—and land more clients.

5. Ask for the sale.

As a pitchman, you can do the most beautiful demonstration in the world, but if you end it with, “Well there you go. Thanks for watching!” people will just smile, nod, and walk away empty handed. But if you ask for the sale, you’ll get it.

Or better yet, assume they are going to buy and just direct them to your helper (see point #6). And once someone buys, others will as well. (Call it herd mentality, breaking the ice, or safety in numbers—most people just hate to go first.)

The lesson: You have to ask for the sale. The same holds true when asking to close a deal or asking your employer for a raise—you have to ask.

6. Get a helper.

People hate to wait, especially in line to buy a product. So if you did a good job of building a large tip, get an assistant who can take money and hand the customer the product. That way you can start your pitch again as new people wander by, which gives you the added benefit of new people seeing others buying the product and wondering what the excitement is about. (Plus, remember people hate to go first, so if you can start your pitch again while customers are buying, then the new people are more likely to buy, too.)

It is much harder to build a tip from scratch than it is to keep one going. The same holds true in business. Use the fact that you just landed one client to help land another. For example, just before you finish a project for one company, call a similar company and say, “We just created a beautiful sales brochure and social media marketing campaign for XYZ Company—do you have any product lines that could use a similar boost in sales?”

The lesson: Once you find you are losing money because you are spending time on administrative work when you could be generating sales, it’s time to hire a helper to keep the money flowing. Keep doing what you do best (pitching, writing, etc.) and let your assistant handle the billing and collection.

7. Be open to new opportunities.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d be selling Ginsu knives to make money. Me, a graduate of Tulane University with a degree in Computer Engineering!

But you know what? I can’t even begin to estimate how much that summer selling Ginsu knives has furthered my career:

• After that summer, interviewing was a breeze. I used to be nervous when interviewing, but no longer. If I can stand on a soap box and sell Ginsu knives to a crowd of 50 sales-resistant show attendees, I can certainly sell my services in a one-on-one interview!
• I learned how to attract positive attention, be interesting, be heard.
• I learned how to pitch ideas, to state my case, to sell my point of view.
• I learned how to communicate the benefits of what I was selling, and I learned to ask for the sale.

When was the last time you learned a new skill? Spoke at a conference? Asked for a raise?

Be bold. Take a fork in the road you might not normally choose.

You never know where it might lead!

Jack Molisani is an STC Fellow and the president of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an agency specializing in staff and contract technical writers: ProspringStaffing.com. He also produces the LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies: Lavacon.org. You can reach jack at JackMolisani@ProspringStaffing.com. Follow Jack on Twitter: @JackMolisani.