Top 10 Sales Lessons from House of Cards’ Frank Underwood

Good Friday morning everyone. To round out our movie week I decided to close it out with Netflix’s House of Cards. I know it’s not a movie but its one heck of a show. Love him or hate him, you have to admit, Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood
has some pretty strong salesmanship skills.

In honor of the Netflix series House of Cards season 5 premiere I’ve gathered these Top Ten valuable lessons that everyone’s least favorite House Majority Whip Vice President President, Frank Underwood, has taught us about how to be better sales people.

While I can’t condone murder or blackmail as a way to get ahead in your sales career, you can certainly borrow some of his more scrupulous sales tactics. So as usual in true David Letterman fashion,

 from the home office in Frank Underwood’s secret bunker

In the opening scene of season 1, we see Frank kill a suffering dog that has been hit by a car with his bare hands. As he tells us, nobody wants to do the unpleasant yet necessary things. To be a great sales person, you also need to do unpleasant yet necessary things sometime. You need to Google your prospects and find out more about them before you cold call them. You need to do some digging to find a new prospect when your old contact falls off the face of the planet.  Sure, you can try to push that work off to someone else, but like Frank says, nobody really wants to do it for you. The top performers know that, and they put in the time to do the less-fun side of sales.

Frank’s a master at getting access to decision makers. How does he do it? He works his way up the food chain and offers his time, advice, and services generously. Then, when it comes time to ask the decision maker for the sale, he has a league of lower-level supporters (often related or close to the decision-maker) singing his praises and supporting his agenda. The analogy to sales here is quite obvious, but I’ll spell it out-no prospect is too unimportant or a waste of your time. It’s only a matter of figuring out how helping a less qualified prospect can get you in touch with a more qualified prospects.

Sometimes in sales you need to call in a favor. You’ll need an introduction from a friend, a person to refer and vouch for your services even if it cost you a little referral money . Frank knows that in order to leverage connections well, you need to have the right connections in the first place. Just look at Zoe Barnes, Peter Russo, and Rachel Posner. He carefully identifies and cultivates relationships with the right people so that later on he can leverage those connections to win the deal. And even if that relationship doesn’t pan out as you planned you can always just push them off the Metro platform. (no, seriously don’t do that) Poor Zoe…

When you’re pitching, you need to know who you’re up against. Frank is great at staying one step ahead of his competition (like he was with Raymond Tusk).

What are your competitors saying to your prospect?

What will their next move be?

How can you pre-empt them?

If you understand your competitors’ products and services, as well as their weaknesses, you can better craft and hone the winning pitch. I’m not saying you should throw your competitors under the bus-as Frank could attest, that never works out well. merchants don’t like to work with mudslingers and get caught up in the middle of a turf war, but they do want to be assured that they’re making a superior choice.

Along the same lines, you can only assure prospects that you’re the superior choice if you intimately understand your own shortcomings. If you don’t, your competitors will uncover them first.

Frank knows that sometimes, saying less is more effective. In sales, if you share too much of your strategy with others, then you’ll inevitably have to back track, or worse-lie- when plans change. And most prospects and merchants can sniff out a lie pretty well, or they will find out. As my wife say’s  “it’s better to under promise and over deliver.”

Where would Frank be without his wife, Claire? While working in merchant services may seem like a constant competition, the best sales people know how to partner up so that they’re working with their colleagues instead of against their colleagues. Just look at you and your current processor as the perfect example. The two teams are typically portrayed as being at-odds with one another and bickering about underwriting,fees and residual splits. But a strong marriage between the two leads to greater success than trying to pave our own independent path to success.

What if Frank had gotten the bid for Secretary of State? Would he have stopped there? Or was his plan to secure the Presidency all along? While we can’t know for sure, it appears Frank always had the end-goal in mind. The sales lesson? Don’t settle for the quick win when, with a little more coaxing and patience, you could land a longer term, more valuable deal.  Do you have a  small processing prospect that only wants lower rates that are so low there is no profit to had?  Stand by your offer that makes you a fair residual and prove why they should spend more money with you. Think long term, your in this business to make money not lose money.

As I stated before, were in this to make money. Too many merchant services sales people are concerned about sharing their pricing too early, scared their prospects gets nervous and decides not to sign. But great sales people know that transparency is the key to building long term trust with a prospect.

Let your value you deliver and price speak for the quality of your product and service. Then, as Frank would advise, limit the fine print around what your pricing includes or doesn’t include. A savvy prospect will know how to read the fine print.

Last but not least, any successful sales professional can tell you that it’s not easy to be the voice of your organization to the outside world.

The responsibility for growing your merchant services business rests on your shoulders. I’ve heard business leaders say that, if not for sales, the rest of us would not be able to put dinner on the table. But that sort of sentiment can understandably rub people the wrong way, because it makes sales seem more important than any other team.

You may overhear colleagues complaining about your work ethic, the hours you put in, the way you respond (or don’t respond) to prospect or merchants emails, etc. etc. But at the end of the day, your job is to sell.

 As Frank knows, the best way to divert negative attention is to make people forget what they were complaining about. You don’t often hear complaints being made about top sales performers, because it’s hard to complain about a salesperson who is feeding the pipeline and closing quality deals. and trust me, processors love a good closer.

So while you’re binge watching House of Cards this week as  have, think about what lessons you can use out in the field on Monday.

And While you’re out there, ask yourself, WWFD?

(What Would Frank Do, c’mon people)

And I’ll leave you with one bonus sales lesson from President Underwood…

Money is fleeting. Power is forever.