The Six D’s Of Exponential Selling
With over half a decade in corporate sales experience, I must have spent half of those years cold calling, trying to find leads that I can turn into opportunities. These opportunities I hoped to turn into sales, which I then hoped would make me a commission ? seen Wolf of Wall Street? Much like that but with far fewer hookers, drugs, and debauchery, of course.
I’ve always imagined a better way.
You see, sales and making money in the most basic sense is a numbers game. The only way you are going to make more money is by finding more leads, more opportunities, therefore more sales, and more commission. The approach is excellent if you want to make a modest income, a couple of hundred grand a year maybe. But what if you wish to get very rich? Wealthy to the point that you can make a change in the world? Invest in groundbreaking technology? Sell in a way that gives you freedom?
By utilizing the technology available in the 21st century, we can harness the power of exponential and global thinking, rather than linear and local thinking. We can use the power of the internet to generate incredible results.
So how do we start selling in an exponential rather than linear way? We need to factor Steve Kotler’s Six D’s of Exponential Growth.
Digitalisation
“Technology becomes exponential once it becomes digitalised. It becomes represented in ones and zeroes. Once that happens, it becomes an information-based technology, and it hops on an exponential growth curve. A classic example being Moore’s laws covering transitions.”
Deception
“These technologies get introduced, and it takes a while for them to get up to speed, right. And there’s all this hype in the beginning and they fall into this deceptive period and people kind of dismiss them. 3D printing was in that deceptive period for a very, very long time. Robotics, AI, all these things. But all of the technologies that we’re talking about are now moving out of that deceptive period.”
Disruption
“A classic example is Uber. It’s totally disrupting the taxicab industry. Instagram totally disrupting Kodak. These are classic examples of the disruption.”
Demonetization
“For example, once you could store digital images on a camera, the film was totally demonetized. And suddenly nobody was buying roll film anymore. Pixels did the same job. So the money comes out of the equation.”
Dematerialization
“Think about all the 1980s or ’90s technology that now comes free with your cellphone, right? Peter and I did a calculation in Abundance and we were looking at this and we found the average cellphone houses over like a million dollars’ worth of technologies from the 1980s. You have your GPS locator, your encyclopedia, your radio and record player, your camera, video recorder, on and on and on, right. You can now, with Instagram, get access to editing software that 10 years ago was a $2 million package. And today it’s free with an Instagram account. So demonetization, dematerialization, the technology itself is disappearing. Nobody’s going out and buying cameras anymore because it comes on your smartphone.”
Democratization
“These technologies themselves become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Cellphones are a classic example. Back in the ’80s, these were a luxury technology that only the wealthiest could have and then it kind of slowly moved down the scale until where we are today. I mean 50 percent of the world? [is] carrying a supercomputer in their pocket. That’s how much these things have been democratized. Access becomes available to anyone.”
And that’s how you track the life cycle of an exponentially growing technology. Kotler uses smartphones as an example, but there are plenty of other applicable innovations that fit this paradigm. Amazon’s digital-distribution business model went through all these stages up until the point when access to hardly any product you could ever want became available with a swipe of the finger.
Think about what technologies today are currently making their way through the above life cycle. Where are the points for growth? Which innovations appear to be headed toward a bright future? Identifying them is key to jumping into the realm of exponential entrepreneurship.