A Sales Lesson from Doctor Who

The Sci-Fi:  Doctor Who; Asylum of the Daleks.  Season 7 (new series) or Season 33 (overall), Episode 1 of the television show Doctor Who.  Directed by Nick Hurran and written by Steven Moffat.

 The Sci-Fi Sitch:  In the first episode of season 7 of Doctor Who, the inimitable Time Lord (in his 11th incarnation, portrayed by Matt Smith) has been kidnapped by the Dalek Parliament.  (The Daleks being, as the BBC puts it, “his oldest foe.”)  They want him to travel down to a planet where they have quarantined those members of their race who are considered to be too crazy and destructive even for Dalek society.  The Doctor and companions Amy and Rory Pond are beamed down to this ‘Asylum of the Daleks,’ and well, no, hilarity does not ensue, but plenty of scary and emotional scenes are experienced by all.

 The Sales Sitch:  Do you know how many times the Doctor has defeated the Daleks?  Neither did I. But when I saw this episode, I figured it had to be up there in the dozens.  (In fact, the UK’s Guardian, as of this particular episode, pegged it at 34 storylines involving the Daleks.)  Didn’t he even destroy them all in the Last Great Time War?  (Well, yes, but no.  You know, wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimy.)  But they just. Keep. Coming. Back.  New season, new battle with the Daleks. 

 And that’s the sales lesson to be drawn from this.  Your toughest competitors are always out there in the shadows, waiting to take advantage at any time.  There is a sales saying to the effect that the day you sign a client is the day you start losing them. That’s the flip-side to the lesson of the Daleks.  The day you beat your ‘oldest foe’ is the day that that foe begins another campaign that will be the end of you, or will take the client away from you, if you’re not careful.

The Sales and Sci-Fi Lesson:  Don’t ever count your competitor out of the running, because they will always come back.  The best you can do is to beat them for now- beat them this season, beat them this episode, beat them this sales cycle.

The Sci-Fi Skinny:  Doctor Who is a BBC television series about a Time Lord, an alien adventurer through time and space in his TARDIS, which looks on the outside like a British police box and is, famously, bigger on the inside.  Guinness World Records pegs Doctor Who as the World’s Most Successful Sci-Fi series, as well as being the Longest Running Sci-Fi series.  And the related media are beyond number, from books to radio shows to comics and on to infinity.  As far as the television show itself, the original ran from 1963 to 1989.   There was a sputtering attempt to re-launch it in 1996, and then in 2005, Doctor Who returned to television with a vengeance, and has been going strong ever since, including a big 50th anniversary bash in 2013.