Game in the Brain

So I’m getting offers for my AEGs and they always ask for “Last Price” my counter is *“is this going to be a waste of my time?”*. So apply lessons from Seth Freeman, I’m looking for indicators of seriousness to follow through or someone just shopping around.

An indicator of seriousness is the following:
1) asking for information that’s not found in the offer page. Ex. More details on scheduling or logistics. Reasons for selling.
2) Most importantly having to offer me something in exchange for the price drop even if  its purely an offer courtesy.

Last Transaction I had:

Cold Offer – Gud day ser ask lang aq sa Aeg my avail paba??
_is the AEG available_

Me – meron po _polite affirmative_

Cold Offer – Ahh ser ak un db?
Cold Offer – Yun naba last prize nyu ser???
_is that the last price sir?_

Me – depends on how serious an offer ito or a waste of tiime.

Cold Offer – Ser dnmn kita tatanungin kung not interested aq.. 2500 kaya ser laguna pa aq manggagaling para my pamasahe aq at pang bala
_sir I would not ask if I’m not interested, 2.5k since I’m coming from laguna_?(about 30km away from me)

Me – Ok. no thanks nalang sir.
_Ok, no thanks in that case sir_
Cold Offer – 3k ser…???

Me – Pare, sinabi mo na ang oras mo is worth 1k pero hindi  oras ko.
Me – sorry sir pero mukang di tayo magkaka intindihan
_ Dude, you just said that your time is worth 1k but not mine. sorry but it looks like we wont understand each other._

I get a lot of offers like this. Sometimes scam materials like Fake Iphone 6 and other types. I actually want to swap a gun for a new set of barbells: 2 bars, 8x 10lbs weights. Used condition it would be half the price of the gun.

Screening Offers, Filtering Leads

My baptism of fire was Amberbase Solutions, when our family biz acquired assets of the terrible Epixstar and its campaigns to pay  the debts of the scam company (epixstar). And one of my lessons was Screening offers, and its still is one of the challenges our sales team have.

As much as we screen offers of suppliers, we have to be judicious about the offers we make to potential  customers. Its such an Open and Rule-less game that no one gives anyone a manual of navigating. Our own sales team have issues from above but no one has any formal doctrine of engagement. I could write one but I could write a lot of things and there is too much on my plate – but the essential part of it is Filtering Leads. This transaction and the less than a minute it took to process is how to FILTER a lead efficiently.

When a sales person is new to a task or there is a new product, the puzzle i how to Filter all the potential clients to those that are REALISTIC. It works in both real business and personal transactions.

Now there is a lot  of strategies to filtering solutions and many disciplines and skills give us a different result when we filter using the expertise these give  us. So its pretty open ended and no one claims absolute mastery. Those who are very successful just have a few key “Tags” to look for that have been proven true and have effective search patterns.

So a lot of this experiences go into my Traveller or Case Study method GMing. I would normally run with the Players grasp of bargaining and elaborate on industry practices and what professionals do.