Should I sell a comb to a bald man?

A classic question in college and interviews - How do you sell a comb to a bald man? It is fun, no doubt, I have enjoyed it thoroughly myself, but today I ask a different question: not how can I, but should I sell a comb to a bald man?

Most would jump to say, no, of course not. He doesn't need it. But look, are we asking questions like 'should I sell a comb to a penguin' ? No, right? Because penguins don't have money, bald men do. Let's think about it a little...

How does one decide whether to sell something to someone?

We decide that based on how much WE want them to buy the thing; not how much THEY want themselves to buy the thing. And that's not wrong.

Why do we want them to buy our product? Because it benefits us in some way. Either monetarily, brand perception-wise, or from a growth and expansion perspective.

We can say 'We LOVE helping our customers' all we want, but we love helping them because helping them helps us. We adopt customer-focused, user-centric, consumer-first approaches because it benefits us. It is business, after all.

How do we know helping someone is going to help us?

We assess the opportunity. Is this potential customer aka prospect, worthy of my time, energy and resources? Will I get something in return for all I'm putting in (aka ROI Return on Investment)? Note that ROI is not merely monetary.

When we do this assessment in marketing it's called lead scoring. What is a lead? A potential customer is called a lead. Lead scoring is us giving weightage to a lead based on how worthy it is of our effort and resources.

In B2B, this worthiness does not depend only on how much money we make by selling to a lead.

How do we decide if a lead is worthy of us?

• Revenue: How much business does it give us? How much money are we making when we successfully sell our product or service to this lead?

• Profitability: Business is not merely about revenue, it's also about how much profit is left for us from the revenue after deducting all our expenses.

• Effort to win: How much time, money and resources of all kinds do we have to spend to win this lead?

• Effort to maintain: A B2B sale is a long-term partnership. How much time, money and resources will it take us long-term to keep them as our customer?

• Growth prospects: Can our business grow and expand with this customer? We also look at potential larger opportunities. Can getting this customer help us get other similar customers?

• Brand: Do we benefit from association with the customer through their brand image?

We cannot know these in detail before we've tried to sell to them; so to determine how worthy a lead is, we have certain parameters. If a lead meets those parameters, we can assume that trying to help this lead might help us. So we prioritize and direct marketing efforts towards them based on how worthy they are.

At this stage, we're still putting comb posters and advertisements outside our shop. How do we know if we should sell our comb to someone who walks in?

For that, we do something called lead qualification. We evaluate whether the people who are admiring our posters, or have stepped into the shop are worthy of trying to sell our combs to.

We set our parameters for what makes a lead worthy of pursuing. For a comb shop, maybe having hair is a non-negotiable parameter? Because that's the primary use case of the product? And that is absolutely right.

But now that a bald man has walked in, do we make an exception?

What if the bald man is buying the comb for a friend or family member who does have hair? What if the bald man is a comb trader? What if the bald man is a handicraft object collector?

But how do we know?

It takes a conversation to understand the real need of the person on the other side. It takes a good understanding of the business and judgement to make the decision of whether a lead should be pursued.

But what if it's not one bald man, but hundred bald men?

Then we look for patterns.

Bald man evaluating every comb, picking up the prettiest ones for a closer look? Probably buying it for a beloved person (who has hair).

Bald man examining the combs deeply for quality and make? Probably a comb trader.

Bald man does not look at combs at all, but looks for the manager? Probably a handicraft object collector.

Bald man loitering about the shop, looking at combs but also nothing in particular? Probably not a potential customer.

When I, as a marketer, have looked at this bald man, perhaps spoken to him; and decided we should try to sell our combs to him, it's called a Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL.

When the person actually selling the comb is convinced that this is a good potential buyer, it's a Sales Qualified Lead or SQL.

And so it goes on until the bald man has bought the comb.

Coming back to my original question, should I sell a comb to a bald man? There is no right answer.