[MUSIC]
The best shows we've ever experiences, the best performers we've ever seen.
Think of Freddy Mercury live at Wembley doing Live Aid.
Or a year later, Queen live at Wembley, 1985,
which is widely considered one of the best rock shows of all time.
What do they do?
They're able to bring that audience into their reality.
They're able to sell an audience, if you will, on to their particular vision.
The audience and the performer becomes one.
That's what great sales is.
>> All too often, someone thinks of selling as the used car salesman.
You've got some piece of junk that you know isn't any good, and
if you smooth talk somebody well enough, they'll buy it anyhow.
To a really good entrepreneur who's building products from day one with
customers in mind, selling begins on day one.
Having a dialogue with customers and co-creating in rolling them in
your vision, and getting them involved in what you're doing, and
building it for and with them, and getting them to crave it.
Or have an element of covetability such that it sells itself to some extent,
that can be built into the engineering process of the product itself.
So it's not just, well I sit in my backroom and build it, and
then I hire someone with a suit to go out and try to sell it.
But rather really getting close to people and understanding what they want, and
also understanding some of the modern tools of inbound marketing and
social network presences to get people connected to you early on.
To get them to really feel they want to be part of what you're doing is
a much more effective way of selling.
>> Join the herd.
It came out naturally.
I'm trying to build a brotherhood here, like a community.
Yeah join us, come on, let's party together,
and let's dance together to our music and wear face paint if you want as well.
We invite them to all of that for them to feel like they're part of something.
>> You can be guilty, and
I've seen some designers fail when they're designing for themselves.
And they're not really designing for the brand.
And for me, Nike was the ultimate challenge.
Because when I went to Nike, I wasn't an 18 year old football crazy kid.
And 12 years later when I left, I still wasn't a football crazy kid, but
I felt that I knew him better than anybody else.
>> For many people the creative process is relatively easy.
But then for some reason when they go out there and they have convince somebody
to buy into this new reality they feel that this is something foreign.
They feel almost uncomfortable with that.
But think that unless whatever you're doing connects with an audience.
Unless you're able to create that joined reality, between you and
whatever audience you have, you will simply just not be successful.
A company exists and a career exists only when there is
a willful participant on the other end to buy into that new reality.
>> Especially a place like Berklee college of music.
Where we've got some of the best young musicians around the planet.
Who are steep at this point in their career with continuing to hone
the jewel of their performance.
And very often I find that that those musicians, I remember when I was age also,
don't really have a connection to how to get their performance before people.
But the older you get, you're going to have to pull that in because
music that you hold to yourself, it's kind of selfish.
If you are a great performer, if you do have something incredible to say, and
only five people hear it, well, what about me?
What about my grandchildren?
What about all the rest of us in the human condition that could have been enriched by
this idea?
So for me, to be a musician is to be responsible to this notion of
trying to get your message, or your musicality, or
your thought process out to as many people as possible.
>> So we channel that passion, that you may have for
the creative process of what you're doing and take that and
apply it into the selling process of what you're doing.
Don't see it as an individual or separate step.
That force that propels you to create something new should be a force that
continues at actually taking that new thing that you've just created and
helping it find its rightful audience.