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How Michael Bloomberg Got His First Sale
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Good Morning! Today is National Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk Day, celebrating the art of moving on from life's mishaps. Like that time you hit "reply all" instead of "forward" on that internal deal strategy email. Or when you shared your screen with the Slack messages that no one was supposed to see. We've all been there. 🫡
How Bloomberg got his first sale 🤝
Re-write your cold email ✍️
Why traditional customer success is dead 🫠
Sales jobs & a meme 😂
How Michael Bloomberg Sold His First Deal
When you hear Bloomberg, you probably think of business news.
The websites, magazines, and TV stations that report on markets, economics, and politics.
But behind the behemoth of the brand is a story about a guy named Michael, and a piece of financial hardware that changed Wall Street.
Fired 👉️ Founder
Michael Bloomberg started his career making $9,000 a year as a clerk at Salomon Brothers and worked his way up to become partner and head of technology.
But in 1981, when Salomon was acquired by Phibro Corp, Bloomberg was let go, at the age of 39, with a $10M payout. (Not too shabby, eh?)
Instead of retiring or finding another job, Bloomberg had an idea: What if traders could access all their financial data from a computer terminal on their desks?
Remember - this was before people even had desktops.
And that led to the birth of The Bloomberg Terminal.
The Numbers Behind Bloomberg Today 📊
Today, Bloomberg LP is a beast:
350,000+ terminal subscribers
Average revenue of $30K per terminal per year
$10B in annual revenue
Terminals in 66 countries
But none of that would exist without landing that first sale.
How Bloomberg Landed His First Sale
Here's where it gets interesting. Bloomberg knew he needed to get a customer before he actually built the terminal.
So, he set his sights on Merrill Lynch.
His strategy? Coffee. Lots of coffee.
I’d take the coffee up to Merrill Lynch—our target audience—and walk the hallways. “Hi,” I would say. “I’m Mike Bloomberg and I brought you a cup of coffee. Can I talk to you?” Even if people were wondering who I was or where I came from, they still took the coffee.
Finally, after a whole lot of coffee, he got a meeting with Ed Moriarty, head of Merrill's Capital Markets Division.
In a room full of Merrill Lynch executives, Bloomberg made his pitch:
"We can give you a yield curve analysis updated throughout the day as the market moves.... We can show you the futures market versus cash and graph it for you as it's changing.... For your traders, we'll keep track of every transaction as it's made and mark their positions to market instantly without any fussing ...." No one else had done any of these things—and neither had we—yet.
Ed Moriarty’s natural reaction was to ask his internal engineers if they could build it instead, but they said they couldn’t start for 6 months.
So, Bloomberg jumped in and said:
I'll get it done in six months and if you don't like it, you don't have to pay for it! Since Hank can't even start for half a year, there'll be no time risk. And since you only pay if it works, no cost risk either.
The deal = closed won.
3 Sales Lessons We Can Learn From Bloomberg
1. Make It a No-Brainer Offer
Bloomberg's offer to Merrill Lynch was genius - they either got a working product or paid nothing. No downside.
The closer you can make your offer to feeling like a "no-brainer," the easier it is to close.
2. Persistence Beats Perfection
Bloomberg didn't have a perfect product. He didn't even have a working product.
But 40-year-old Michael Bloomberg had a lot of persistence. He showed up at the Merrill Lynch office every day with coffee, building relationships, and staying top of mind.
3. Solve Real Problems and Sell The Gap
Bloomberg was solving a real pain point for traders who had to look up everything manually. And the fact that the internal engineers at Merrill Lynch couldn’t even start on the project for 6 months gave him a gap to sell into.
The best sales pitches don't focus on features, they focus on the underlying problems.
What is your favorite lesson from Bloomberg? |
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