Power of specific knowledge/skill
Today, I was returning from my hometown to Dumdum (Kolkata) by train. I was at a coupe of a compartment where there were around 50 people on average at a time. It is Sunday, so the crowd was way less than the weekdays. While entering the Dumdum, where I had to get down, the train stopped in signal for around 5 minutes. A salesman came to our coupe and started selling an Ayurvedic tablet for Stomach problem at Rs. 20/-. Stomach problems are serious issues for majority of Indians, especially Bengalis who live for eating (pun intended! ). The salesman was young and confident. He started saying that his father also used to sell the medicine, something like this “you might be knowing my father, an old man in dhutis with curly hair (the sales man also had curly hair), used to sell this medicine in train too”. He started telling the day-to-day life problem related to stomach issues without filtering. In between, he was adding different other examples to support his claim about the benefit of the medicine. I am not going into details of his selling pitch, but it was highly relatable to people. He started very formally, but gradually, after noticing that the people are buying his story, he became little informal and went deep into the real problems without any filter. He kept improvising, but it never felt he is making things up. Although it is highly questionable whether all his stories are true, but he clearly wins here at that moment for that audience, a kind of leverage. He was addressing everyone’s question, although repetitive, with utter passion without any rush to move to next coupe. He spent all 5-7 minutes in the coupe, kept telling the stories and improvising without repeating the same thing, and end up selling his medicine to around 25% of the people of the coupe. I was so lured by his pitch that although I do not have the problem, I started feeling that the medicine must be good and felt like buying.
This reminds me of Naval Ravikant’s quote on specific skill: “Arm yourself with specific knowledge, , accountability and leverage”, and “Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable”.
