Cookies are for closers!
Thursday, February 2nd, 2006
Tonight I’m making cookies for the sales staff where I work. Here’s the story.
One time, near the end of a fiscal quarter, the CEO issued an e-mail that read something like this:
We’re getting near the end of the quarter, and it’s looking good. Let’s all pull together and encourage our fine sales staff to reach for the stars and exceed their goal! If there’s anything you can do to help them, do it!
I thought to myself, “Cookies! I’ll make them cookies!” So I did. I followed the recipe I’ve used for a long time, and I made a quadruple batch! I brought the cookies into the office the next day, and I carefully set two on the desk of each sales person. In their common area I put a big bowl of the cookies with a sign above that read:
Cookies are for closers!
This was my reference to A-B-C: A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing from David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross. In the play there is a famous line: “Put that coffee down!! Coffee’s for closers only!” I was trying to be funny, especially since that same CEO had recently given each of us a set of little wood blocks that stuck together with magnets — A, B, C. (On my set I wrote “Always Be Coding” — but that’s another story.)
The cookies were a great success! The sales staff loved them! They gobbled the two I gave them “for free,” and each time they closed another sale they got another cookie from the bowl!
About a week before the end of the next quarter, they started asking me: where’s the cookies? One sales staffer in particular used to ask me nearly every day if I was going to bring cookies again. And thus, the tradition was born. I don’t do it every time, but many times I make cookies for them at the end of the fiscal quarter. This quarter, they’re getting some.