If a MacGuffin is the thing that is wanted at all cost, then isn’t it the sales leads themselves that are the MacGuffins? Except we know what a sales lead is, and what it means, so those aren’t really MacGuffins. The sold property itself is really just a prop, not a central device itself.
The concept holds that it’s entirely irrelevant, thus falling into the definition of “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.”
A ‘sit-down’. A meeting. A ‘coffee and crumb cake in Mrs. Johnson’s kitchen while we discuss this once-in-a-lifetime offer’. A sit.
They’re not necessarily scams. Back in the 70s, I sat in on one of these sales pitches. The company – General Development Corp. – was selling lots in undeveloped swampland they named Port St. Lucie. Right now, Port St. Lucie has over 150,000 people (though it was badly hurt in the housing bubble). Still, they were real lots in a real location and I could have bought one.
Dreams.
Coffee is for closers!
It gets so you don’t mind it. That’s the worst thing that I can confess. You know how long it took me to get there? A long time. When you die you’re going to regret the things you don’t do. You think you’re queer? I’m going to tell you something: we’re all queer. You think you’re a thief? So what? You get befuddled by a middle-class morality? Get shut of it. Shut it out. You cheat on your wife? You did it, live with it. You fuck little girls, so be it. There’s an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing. Bad people go to hell? I don’t think so. If you think that, act that way. A hell exists on earth? Yes. I won’t live in it. That’s me.
Would anyone care to speculate as to what made the “premium leads”–the Glengarry leads–so special?
Probably they’re actually people who have indicated an interest in investment properties.
They were new, for a start. The other ones were ‘tired’ - many of the contacts were known to the other sales guys.
I am now going to have to source the movie and watch it again, damn it.
Though I can appreciate this movie for the acting, and the fact that it does what it sets out to do very well, I simply cannot watch it without breaking out in horrible hives of nervous paranoia. It’s like an overdose of a-tiger-is-about-to-eat-me levels of stress adrenaline. I’m far too tame to be able to metabolize that degree of anxiety! I’ve only seen it once and I really never want to repeat experience.
Signed,
Mild Marge
Sort of. It depends on the company. There is a lot of overlap between marketing, advertising and PR. Essentially, they are responsible for creating the brand image of the company. Specifically, marketing tries to determine what people will like and how to adjust either the company’s products or their messaging to the consumer.
Sales is responsible for “closing the deal”. But they might also be expected to generate their own leads. For example, a pharma rep might be assigned a territory and it’s really up to them to pick up a phone book (ie Google) and start visiting all the doctor’s offices and hospitals in that territory. Same thing with B2B (business selling to another business) sales.
In the example of GgGR, since they are a B2C company (business selling to regular people or “consumers”), it’s not an effective use of the salesman’s time to cold call the phonebook as most calls will be useless. So they would most likely “pay good money” to a company that aggregates consumer data.
Really when you here about the worth of companies like Facebook, LinkedIn or Google, their value is not in their ability to allow idiots to post drunken pictures of themselves, connect with people they ignored in high school or play Farmville. It’s their ability to agregate all the data from user’s “likes”, “interests”, relationships, demographics, education, work history and other info you provide.
Decades ago, I saw a “60 Minutes” type TV show (not “60 Minutes,” just a news prgram following the same format) about a sleazy real estate operation very much like the one David Mamet wrote about in Glengarry Glen Ross. In this case, the salesmen were selling desert land in Arizona and New mexico, mostly to elderly people looking for a place to retire.
One of their former salesmen (a good looking, mustachioed guy with more than a little Ricky Roma in him) was telling the reporter all about his old tricks. He took the reporter out in a jeep to see some of the desert land he was selling. It SHOULD have been immediately obvious to anyone that the land was worthless and would never be inhabitable.
The reporter asked, “Did people actually SEE this land before buying it?” The salesman said, in essence, “Obviously, the ideal thing was to sell the land sight unseen. But even if people came out to see the land, I could usually make the sale.”
When the reporter seemed incredulous, the salesman talked about how he’d take old people out in his jeep, and talked about buying the land as if it were a grand adventure in the Old West! He made it sound exciting, as if the elderly couple were pioneers! And frequently, that was appealing to an old couple living in a small apartment in a big, crowded, crime-ridden city.
See… when a salesman has a quality product, he sells the product. But when a product is crap, the salesman has to sell it as something else. The salesman on this news show was like Ricky Roma- he knew the land was worthless, so he sold the land as something else. As a DREAM of a better life. Or as a symbol of all the adventurous things his client has never done.
Roma’s client, James Lingk, is a timid, henpecked middle aged guy who’s never done anything he really wanted to do in his life. Ricky Roma didn’t sell him land AS land- he sold him land as a symbol of Lingk’s manhood. Somehow, Roma made Lingk think that buying land was an adventurous break form his boring life.
Mitch and Murray spent more than a buck each getting them?
There was actually a chance that the land would be developed?
The people had bought before?
Obviously, you’ve never been propositioned by a timeshare salesman.
So Zuckerberg got the Cadillac El Dorado, Sean Parker got the steak knives and Eduardo Saverin got fired?
No, I haven’t. I get it that timeshares are different, because you have to sell a lot of timeshares on each property, so you have to mass-market and be pushy. But, the GGR guys aren’t selling timeshares.
That’s the funny thing, the guys never once bitch about the quality of the product they’re selling. They don’t even say much about what the product is, hence my confusion. They just bitch, bitch, bitch about the leads.
It’s like, you can give them shit on a stick to sell, and they can overcome that. But if you give them a “cold” “deadbeat” lead that Mitch & Murray “got out of the phone book”, they can’t overcome that.
Of course the product is unimportant, because of course it’s crap. That’s a given. And so, since the product is crap, they need suckers, which means they need the leads.
Just get them to sign on the line which is dotted.
I can go out there tonight with the materials you’ve got and make myself $15,000. Tonight! In two hours! Can YOU?