If you can’t make it, you shouldn’t be selling it.
I saw an ad for The Leatherman tool on late night TV. It reminded me of a quote a good friend of mine said about them - “If I can’t fix it with this, I shouldn’t be fixing it.”
Yesterday morning, I was in a meeting with one of the teams bouncing around an idea we wanted to take into a client meeting. Two hours later, one of our developers walked into my office and put his phone on my desk with a fully operational prototype. Knowing I have dozens of guys like that in my organization struck me.
With the “race to the middle”, “media-agnostic” and other such buzzwords for agencies nowadays, there are an amazing number of companies selling things they have no idea how to actually make. Sure, everyone uses outside vendors for specialty services, or for staffing overflow. But if you can’t actually make something completely in-house, you really shouldn’t be trying to sell it.
I’m sure I could do a little research and give a moderately compelling presentation on the construction of a nuclear power plant, but you certainly wouldn’t want me building it.
