By Jim Nicholson
Any book purporting to be both a memoir and a how-to manual for high stakes aerospace salesmanship with a dust jacket containing quotes from a Reagan Administration Chief of Staff, a former Air Force Chief of Staff, a Marine Corps Commandant and Dick Gephardt—not to mention having the Naval Institute Press for a publisher—promises to be a tale told by an ultimate insider. Tom Gunn’s “GUNNSIGHTS” delivers that promise.
Although aerospace sales are the focus and aerospace tales provide the ample illustrations, in reality, “GUNNSIGHTS” is a common sense manual to both sales in general and selling oneself in the abstract. As the latter, it is likely to prove useful in areas as far flung as getting into the grad school of your dreams to landing a decent new job in a period of economic downturn turned ugly.
Gunn, a retired McDonnell-Douglas marketing executive, uses a self-deprecating sense of humor, a steady stream of insider anecdotes and consistently logical, if all too often ignored, common sense insights to explicate how one sells $250 billion worth of high tech aerospace product. The logic makes the staggering monetary amount seem almost commonplace.
Gunn’s insights (and he provides plenty of examples of what happens when they’re not followed) are often so simple it’s intriguing that they have to be explicated, for instance:
“For any given competition, start by listening to the customer. Analyze previous competitions held by the customer: delineate the discriminators, the technical issues, pricing. Assess your current competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Assess your own strengths and weaknesses, and develop remedies. Have a defined strategy. Assemble sufficient resources (personnel, facilities, money) and make sure that everyone on the team has a specific assignment and that everyone knows what everyone else is supposed to do. Read the Request for Proposal carefully: competitions have been lost because someone misunderstood, or chose to ignore, a clause in the document…Finally, have a solid proposal.”
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It seems obvious. Gunn demonstrates that it’s not. “Don’t try to sell them what you have, sell them what they need,” conjures visions of any number of major appliance shopping expeditions experienced daily by non-aerospace buyers. Unless you’re hopelessly gullible, you shop until you locate exactly what you need. It’s the same buying experience multiplied by a few billion dollars. His observation that “the hardest sale to make was to my own company” will resonate in practically any profession.
His knowledge of politics is uncomfortably real (“To be brutally frank, the voters in any district, themselves, do not have enough money to support a candidacy in today’s media-driven campaign frenzies”)
and the business solution (allocating appropriate company contributions to selected members of Congress) is beyond frank. “Money buys access, granting you the opportunity to have a conversation on the telephone, or a meeting.”
The insights into aerospace sales are equally honest. “It costs so damn much money to build these airplanes that we can’t possibly amortize the cost with just domestic sales…Mr. Mac, God rest his soul, had an international target of twenty-eight percent.” Those international sales, of course, depend on being savvy about international politics (“You need to make your pitch not only to the government of today, but the likely government of tomorrow. Be a friend to all. But especially, be a friend to the military, unlikely to be changed much in any change of government, and seek out professional bureaucrats who know their way around the system and will endure”). He also reminds one that all militaries—and all branches of the armed services—have a heritage and it behooves one to brush up on the history (and the sales record) in advance.
The ground rules laid down for international socializing conjure mental images of the sublime agony of faux pas to be endured by the internationally insensitive. “Dressing up is better than dressing down…have your tux handy when traveling in Europe…if you are a dinner guest at a private home in Holland, leave a tip for the servants; in Finland, be prepared for the pre-dinner sauna where clothing is not an issue…if there is a choice—chopsticks or knife and fork—follow the lead of your host;” (if the former,) “it would be beyond helpful to have practiced picking up peanuts in advance…in China, leave something on your plate; in France, don’t ask for ketchup.” Being culturally aware is obvious good business.
In dealing with clients of any ilk, Gunn advises to have an agenda, an outline and talking points and to let the customer know you’ve been listening to them. “Repeat a key phrase, or re-word a comment…ask questions to draw the customer out, not flat statements to shut them down.” Good sales, it seems, are a lot like good teaching. In fact, throughout the book, analogies can be immediately drawn to other professions.
Gunn’s prime mantra “take advantage of any advantage” is displayed early in the book. Although he does a good job of portraying himself as the black sheep of the family and making plenty of jokes at his own expense, he also glosses over prime family history. His father received a local appointment from the Truman Administration and was president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen. His mother was chairperson of Stuart Symington’s senatorial campaigns. Tom Eagleton was a cousin. This particular family background offers a fair amount of advantage. Prior to joining McDonnell-Douglas, Gunn spent six years working with Sen. John McClellan, ultimately on the staff of the Appropriations Committee (“I had responsibility for all requests from the Department of Defense and individual military services for research and development appropriations, and had the appropriate security clearances and “special accesses.” I had on-going contacts with Department of Defense officials, the service secretaries, senior officers, top-level staff at the national Security Agency and, especially, the Central Intelligence Agency”). Small wonder his resume was appealing to McDonnell-Douglas.
While having a friendly “what have you been doing lately” employment interview chat with Mr. McDonnell, Gunn let drop that he had been “working on some classified aerospace programs—the B-1 bomber and stealth technology.” Taking mutual advantage of any advantage, a career was born.
