Specialty Consumer Electronics is a rude French waiter.

Lots of Americans who love food will never venture into a nice French restaurant.

Lots of Americans who love music will never venture into a specialty electronics store.

For nearly the same reasons.

They think that, in the restaurant, the waiter is going to roll his eyes and sniff if they mispronounce Terrinede Foie pour Deux or order the “wrong” wine pairing.

They’re intimidated about going into the CE Specialist store because they don’t know what a “120 Hz refresh rate” is, and are afraid the salesperson will discover their ignorance, then roll his eyes and sniff.

Who needs it? Especially when there’s unlimited bread sticks at Olive Garden and a Hannspree HDTV ready to load onto your cart at Costco?

They bite their tongues when their neighbor invites them over for dinner and proudly shows off his new Bose system.

Sure, the food at the Le Café élitiste is terrific and the Runco PlasmaWall nearly sucks your eyeballs out it’s so good, but the fact is, most people, even most of the people who can easily afford the good stuff, are never going to taste the good French food or see the good plasma TV.

Because they’ve been scared away.

Too often, I see specialty retailers wringing their hands as even their regular customers are lured away to Audiogon and eBay. Dealers click their tongues (and roll their eyes) as they lament the fact that “today’s young people don’t care about good sound.” They bite their tongues when their neighbor invites them over for dinner and proudly shows off his new Bose system.

Maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Savvy restaurateurs know they can’t rely forever solely on the patronage of their regular customers. Regular customers move away, get bored or die. Staying in business means always attracting new customers (who hopefully become regulars). Recognizing the folly of an exclusionary reputation, most ethnic restaurants now print their menu descriptions in English.

I haven’t seen many examples of specialty CE dealers (or, to spread the blame fairly, specialty CE manufacturers) doing the equivalent.

I think they should. And I’ll present some specific recommendations in my next post.

You can’t make living selling big trombones. Mandolin picks perhaps, and here and there a Jew’s Harp.

Recently, a friend, Tom Scearce, who attends an entrepreneurial roundtable to which I also belong, posted a blog titled 4 Tips for Selling in the Moment.

As a person who has more friends and acquaintances in the field of sales and sales management than any other, I was interested. Sales and how to increase them are subjects we never get tired of discussing. Which is weird, because the things about which we complain and comment never seem to change much.

Every effective salesperson knows they have to 1. qualify the customer, 2. overcome objections and 3. ask for the sale.

Every sales manager knows that twenty percent of their sales staff are going to bring in about eighty percent of the revenue, and that the sales manager will spend eighty percent of his or her time working – not with the top salespeople – but in trying to encourage, teach, incentivize or threaten the mid- to low-level performers to do better.

...what are particularly striking are the references to new technology and product obsolescence that are threatening and bewildering them.

Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man hit Broadway in 1957. It’s a dazzlingly clever musical about a small Midwest town (River City) near the turn of the century. It affectionately teases the morals (and moral outrage) of this community. What made it work so well in 1957 (and today) is showing so clearly that, while context may change, moral compasses remain.

For example, the matrons of River City are incensed by an independent woman(!) librarian who allows on the shelves the work of "ribald" authors such as Balzac. The protagonist, con man and salesperson extraordinaire “Professor” Harold Hill rallies the rubes against the evils of a newly opened pool hall in their midst.

Substitute the late-Fifties clamor to censure Allen Ginsberg’s Howl for Balzac and the video game Grand Theft Auto for pool, and you see the enduring magic of the play.

Continuing the comparison, in the opening number of the musical, (I urge you to see it here) we listen in while a group of salesmen, traveling aboard the Rock Island railroad line, complain and explain the concerns of their profession. They squawk about cash versus credit and the absolutely vital importance of “knowing the territory.” But what are particularly striking are the references to new technology, product obsolescence and general stores that are threatening and bewildering them.

Substitute Internet for Model T, CD player for demijohn and specialist retailer for little bitty store and…well, you get it.

One salesman frets: “Why it’s the Model T Ford made the trouble, made the people wanna go, wanna get, wanna get up and go…”

“Who’s gonna patronize a little bitty two by four store anymore?”

“Gone. Gone with the hogshead cask and the demijohn, gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan, gone with the tub and the pail and the fence.”

Substitute Internet for Model T, CD player for demijohn and specialist retailer for little bitty store and…well, you get it.

We're still talking and bickering about the same things, a hundred years past the Model T.

One last thing: The salesmen on the train are intrigued and threatened by stories of a master persuader – a character named Hill. They agree that his product can’t be sold. Yet, this bull’s eye salesman “…lives like a king and he dallies and he gathers and he plucks and shines and when the man dances, certainly boys, what else? The piper pays him!”