Paint the Shark: The 1962 XP-755 Mako Shark and Great Salespeople

First, a tip of the cap to the king of sales analogies and car enthusiast, Dave Kurlan . I was inspired by his blog a couple of weeks ago to not just let that every day, oddball stuff I see pass me by. You can read that inspiration here. Briefly, when you see a monkey sitting on a basketball, don’t just let that go. Bring some value!

In 1961, with the design for the 1963 Corvette C2 complete, General Motors Styling and Design head Bill Mitchell conceived of a concept for the future Corvette. The project was the XP-755 Mako Shark. The inspiration for the car derived from an actual mako shark that hung on the wall in Mitchell’s office at the time. Mitchell ordered his team to paint the car to exactly match the fish’s blue/gray upper surface, blending into its white underside.

After Michell rejected every single paint scheme matching attempted by the design team, the team members came up with an idea:?In the middle of the night, they kidnapped the shark from Mitchell’s office, painted it to match the team's best effort on the car, and then returned the fish to Mitchell’s office. The following morning, the team presented Mitchell with the proper paint samples as an exact match to the newly painted shark. Mitchell declared himself overjoyed with the team and immediately approved their perfect duplication of his shark.

Great Salespeople know how to Paint the Shark. Painting the Shark in sales is the ability to disrupt a buying process often stacked against them. Here are just three examples of how:

• Reaches and meets with the final decision-maker as a required milestone of their sales process.?
• Understands the difference between symptoms, problems, and their implications.
• Resists the urge to quote early in the sales process and attempts to modify any RFQ/RFP.

Of course, there are other examples. The point is that great salespeople do it differently. How a great salesperson sells is the first, most effective differentiator. They first commit to and risk being different from others and, in time, they are different. And better! They are the elite top 6% of all salespeople.

You may be thinking the original Painting of the Shark is dishonest, unethical, or an example of the end justifying the means. While arguable, it's a fun and true story to illustrate how some are able to make an assessment and use their strengths and skills to fix the buyer’s problem once and for all even when the buyer has unfavorably tilted the playing field. That all pretty much describes the salesperson’s everyday situation. Great salespeople Paint the Shark.

Do your your salespeople Paint the Shark? The most common answer to this question is "I don't know." What I know when I hear "I don't know" is how much not knowing the answer to that question has cost and is costing the organization.

That's the shark I've painting for quite some time!

The ask: Included with your comments, We'd all love to read examples of how you’ve seen a shark get painted.