How To: Sell an Asteroid to Captain Kirk


In this installment, we’ll use a famous organization--the Starship Enterprise, to illustrate how to employ empathy selling to a diverse group of buyer/influencers, based on different ‘wins’, personalities and concerns.

Your mandate from corporate is to penetrate the Starship Enterprise and sell Captain Kirk an asteroid. You’ve watched enough episodes in preparation to determine your hierarchy of buyers/influencers as follows:

Captain Kirk- Principal Buyer and Financial Buyer

Mr. Spock - User/Buyer and heavy influencer--Chief Information Officer

Bones - Heavy influencer, but not a buyer--can only say no

Scotty - User/Buyer and heavy influencer

Sulu - User/Buyer and heavy influencer

To best employ empathy selling in this environment, we must examine each Buyer’s personality and role in the value proposition each will play when taking ownership of a new asteroid. First, we detail personalities:

Kirk - Passionate, but measured. Uses Spock’s logic as a cornerstone for most ‘Enterprise-wide’ decisions. As demonstrated in his priceline.com commercials, Kirk will encourage you to ‘Name your price!’.

Spock - The ultimate logic-based decisionmaking machine. Emotional tactics won’t move Spock in the slightest. Return-on-Investment, scalability, ease of use all would play a greater role in Spock’s win than the size, shape or color of your asteroidal offering.

Bones - Crusty, flinty ship’s Medical Officer, McCoy has no investment in an asteroid as a Buyer, but, as in every other episode of Star Trek, Bones can easily sway Buyer opinions with one scathing remark: “Damn it Jim, I’m a Dr., not a @#*! Geologist!” Care must be taken to create a ‘win’ for Bones, or he could scrub the entire transaction.

Scotty - As Ship’s Engineer, Scotty is both a User/Buyer and Technical Buyer. After all, the Dilithium Crystals embedded in the asteroid will be utilized by Scotty to bring them back from other galaxies in future episodes. Scotty must be sold principally on ease of installation; “Hurry, Captain, I can’t hold it any longer-r-r!”

Sulu - The inscrutable Ship’s Officer/Navigator. The X factor in the transaction. Other than setting the coordinates for the next episode’s final frontier and manning the photon torpedoes, it’s difficult to assess what Sulu actually has to do with the show, much less the transaction. The advice here is not to ignore Sulu, or run the risk of him using his influence to negatively affect the outcome. No buy-in from Sulu, no sale.

In our next installment, we’ll craft presentations to each party in the Enterprise, designed to get a specific ‘win’ from each diverse Buyer/Influencer personality type. We’ll set our verbal phasors for a ‘stunning’ presentation.


1. Introduction, Empathy Selling
2. Adjustments
3. Break down the transaction
4. Focus Power, Daniel-san!
5. Sell an Asteroid to Captain Kirk
6. Can’t build a bridge? Build a pipeline--Can’t tear down a wall? Build a ramp.
7. Employ Empathy Marketing for Biz Dev
8. Empathy Selling, Mastery is Transparency
9. Empathy Selling, Stir of Echoes
10. Empathy Selling – Why Empathy Works
11. Empathy Selling: How Do The Other Guy’s Shoes Fit?