We are just a few days away from this year’s Academy Awards. With my background, I am partial to movies that have a great sales angle. Unfortunately, most of these scenes are of people defrauding or planning to defraud people. This has helped to perpetuate the feeling that sales people are trying to cheat their customers. That being said, there are some really entertaining and great sales scenes. Most have a great sales learning, but you have to dig through it.
Here are my favourite sales scenes of all time. Please be aware that a few of the clips have some salty language.
Glenngarry Glen Ross
Coffee is for Closers by coffeforclosers
As a movie goes, this has some great actors with Pacino, Baldwin, Lemon, Arkin, Spacey, and Harris. There are a couple great points from a sales leadership perspective. One is that contests are a fun way to incent the sales team, you may not want to have one of the prizes being fired. They have a couple great training tools with ABC and AIDA. Of course, one of the best lines is, “Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers only.”
Boiler Room
In this scene, Vin Disel is a polished, if not unethical sales person. My favourite part of his speech is when he stops and embraces the silence on the call. Once he closes the customer he gets off the phone fairly quickly. Once you have accomplished your goal for the call, get off the phone.
Wolf of Wall Street
This is one of the newer sales movies that I really enjoyed. It is also one of the sales used to defraud people. One of the things that is a common theme through the movie is creating a successful plan and script. This is the underpinning of why this company is so successful.
Tommy Boy
Tommy Boy is probably the best example of an ethical sales situation. My favourite part of this clip is where he is selling by telling a story. There is also a great clip where David Spade gets shot down because he is focusing on the features and not the benefits for the customer.
As a side note, part of this scene was filmed about a 5 minute walk from our office in Toronto.
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