Do you know how many hours a professional musician practices in a day? It varies throughout a musicians career but I averaged 6 hours a day while I studied classical guitar in college. At least I should have been practicing that much. This was all to perfect a series of 3 minute pieces of music. Later I wanted to perfect an hour set as I toured the country playing indie folk songs. As my life changed over the next 20 years I realized that I have been practicing for years to execute things I enjoy doing. So when it came to starting my own business or working on projects that were not music related, I wanted to be excellent at it.
When my friend Rob Masters of Rob’s Mountain Gin sent me Cathy Huyghe‘s article on why a gin company hired musicians as salespeople I could only wonder why more people haven’t already figured out this is a brilliant idea.
The cost of recruiting and retaining new salespeople was bleeding Martin Miller’s Gin company dry. That is, until two and a half years ago when CEO Jacob Ehrenkrona had a bright idea for tapping into a new part-time salesforce.
Ehrenkrona realized that young musicians would make the perfect salespeople for his product. For one thing, they’re already in the places where he wants his gin to be — such as clubs, trendy bars, and hip restaurants. Musicians add the cool factor that Martin Miller’s needed to inject into their product in order to attract the next generation of consumers.
Then, there are transferrable skills: he finds musicians to be organized, educated, authentic, and intentional in their focus. There’s no “pretending” to be a successful musician. And like a good salesperson, a good musician needs a certain amount of hustle to get gigs. “I’ve been a hustler since the beginning, so that mentality is nothing new to me,” musician-salesperson Jake Pinto said. “To be a hustler is to live on that edge between being obnoxious and doing what it takes to make it happen.”
Read the rest of the article… HERE!
