Lessons Learned From a Square Watermelon

Let's talk about square watermelons for a minute, and how they relate to sales...yep, you read that right, we can learn a lot in sales from square watermelons. Just stick with me, it'll all make sense.

Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo is one of the densest cities in the world. Space comes at a premium, with the cost to buy Real Estate in the city center commanding upwards of 104,515 Yen ($939.69 USD) per square foot. Let that sink in for a moment, it will cost you nearly $100,000 to buy a 10x10 room. Despite the extreme cost to live in the city center, people still flock to be fortunate enough to own a small piece of real estate there.

With Real Estate prices at such extremes grocers can't afford to be anything less than ultra efficient when it comes to space. Walking through a Tokyo grocery store can be a bit terrifying if you're claustrophobic, with narrow aisles and product stacked floor to ceiling, not a single inch of space is wasted. Being the model of efficiency out of necessity, it is very rare to find something not stackable in a store.

Now I doubt anyone has ever tried it, but stacking a watermelon on top of another is an impossible task. Because of its round and oblong shape and inability to be stacked, watermelons simply weren't found in a Tokyo grocery store. Due to the extreme cost of space and the inability to stack the fruit, it was simply assumed that one couldn't find watermelon in Tokyo Japan, unless they were willing to pay astronomical sums of money for them in auction.

There has to be a way!

Two watermelon farmers outside the city weren't satisfied with this assumption, there had to be a way to get their product onto the Tokyo grocery shelves. Here's where they had an epiphany. "What if our melons were square?" they thought. Taking the idea and running with it, they built clear, strong, plexiglass boxes with a small hole in the side. They took those boxes out to the fields, and placed the just budding melon through the holes in the boxes. To their surprise and delight, as the melons grew, they took on the shape of the box they were in.

Once mature and ready, the farmers removed the boxes, cut the stem, stacked their perfectly square melons in their truck and were off to Tokyo city. Selling the melons off the back of their truck, they were completely sold out within an hour. Not just that, but the price was driven up dramatically by customers looking to bite into the juicy fruit. Where as a typical watermelon costs $3-$5, bids for the melon shot up to $500 before they sold out. Much like Real Estate in Tokyo city, scarcity drove the prices to astronomical levels.

Recognizing they had a hit on their hands, the farmers went back to work. They invested their windfall of cash into more land, more plexiglass boxes, and they prepared for next season. Today, square watermelons can be found throughout Tokyo grocery stores for an average price of $200 a piece. The farmers are wealthy beyond their wildest dreams and continue to reinvest into their business to keep up with rising demand.

What does this have to do with sales?

How many times have you encountered a prospect where a colleague or even competitor says "that sale can't be made," or "nobody can give that person what they want, it just can't be done." This is all too common in sales, but the truly exceptional performers don't buy into these notions. Just because somebody failed in the past, just because it hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean it can't be done. We just haven't found the solution yet. Top performing sales people cast aside the naysayers and doubt, they give no stock to the fact that "nobody has ever had watermelons in Tokyo," but instead relentlessly pursue the solution until they find it. When one has this sort of laser beam focus on solutions, rather than being fixated on failures and problems, they will be successful beyond their wildest dreams. The real question is, how will you think outside the box today....or in the case of our Japanese farmer friends, inside the box.