Terrorist Act = Your Sales Opportunity

No, I’m not kidding. Whenever there’s a terrorist act or attempted act of terrorism, smart sales pros get busy making money while the average ones run around like Chicken Little.

Let me tell you a true story.

Right after 9/11, I flew to New York City for a business meeting. It was a small jet — seating around 40 — but I was the only passenger on board. Two flight attendants, a pilot, a co-pilot and me. They gave me extra peanuts.

When I arrived in New York, my clients (editors, as it happens) were enormously impressed that I was willing to fly in order to meet with them. However, I was just amazed that nobody else (including my competitors) had been willing to do the same.

Nothing has changed. Check out what happened last week. One easily-foiled plot — eight years and millions of flights after the last one — and suddenly everyone is screaming about airline safely like a bunch of poncy hairdressers.

The way I see it, all this breast-beating and finger-pointing about airlines safety is a national embarrassment. I can think of no better way than to convince the world that the United States is a society of gutless cowards than forcing every airline passenger in the country to forgo a bathroom break, simply because there’s a .00000001 percent chance of a terrorist attack.

Unless circumstances massively change, the likelihood of being killed in a terrorist attack, even in countries where they’re common, is minuscule. And in the United States, it’s beyond minuscule.

Let’s do the numbers.

In the past decade, there have been about 130 million commercial airline flights, involving about 6.5 billion passengers. If you lined up 6.5 billion people like in a boarding queue, the line would wrap all the way around the earth. Not once, not twice, but almost 100 times!!

In that same decade, aside from 9/11, exactly zero American citizens have died as the result of airplane bombings. By contrast, during that same period, ten million Americans died of heart disease. You’re in infinitely more danger from that second bowl of ice-cream than you are from flying on an airplane.

Needless to say, anybody who is worried about airline safety because of a single, failed incident is massively over-reacting. And when that happens, people lose business. They change their behavior. They stop flying on airplanes. They stop visiting clients. They start worrying about dying. They gossip about their worries.

By contrast, smart sales pros get their butts in gear and take advantage of the confusion.

BTW, the same thing is true during a financial disaster. During the recent meltdown, when almost everybody was crying doom and gloom, a few smart operators were snapping up undervalued stock, hiring top employees who had been laid off in a panic, and loading up their pipeline with new opportunities.

When everyone else isn’t thinking straight, it’s time to make your gutsy moves. Ace out a competitor. Go for the big upsell. Focus on getting the job done.