Success Stories – Evelyne Platnic Cohen

Success is Daily Pleasure

Evelyne started by redefining success: “Success means absolutely nothing. What matters is the pleasure of doing what you have to do every day.” This philosophy runs through her entire career, from her beginnings as a saleswoman at Vivendi to her current projects.

For her, measuring the success of others means ensuring they enjoy doing what she asks of them. This humanistic approach to business partly explains her successive achievements and her ability to attract the greatest talents.

The Sales Profession: Timeless Qualities

Contrary to popular belief, Evelyne asserts that the sales profession has not fundamentally changed. While new tools are certainly provided (CRM, technologies), the qualities required have remained the same for centuries: tenacity, curiosity, sales expertise, behavioral adaptability.

The real change? Salespeople must be better because customers are more informed. Hence the crucial importance of nurturing salespeople: providing them with a broad business culture, feeding them information on the ecosystem, competitors, and sustainable development challenges.

Marketing and Sales: A Dance to Synchronize

Evelyne demystifies the supposed war between marketing and sales: “It’s a dance, and they need to dance beautifully together.” Marketing has not taken over, contrary to what some may have believed. The reality shows that even the most successful websites have hundreds of salespeople.

The key? A daily interaction where sales is the source of information for marketing, and marketing provides tools and data to the sales teams. Problems often arise from a lack of communication and mutual recognition of each other’s work.

The Artist Academy: When Sales Becomes Passion

The adventure of The Artist Academy perfectly illustrates Evelyne’s sales superpower. How to convince Patrick Bruel, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, or Maître Gims to share their secrets? Through pure, hard-nosed sales: prospecting to meet them, then convincing through listening and behavioral adaptation.

The first, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, trusted her after having “Googled” her: “I find you energetic, I want to trust you.” Once the first one was convinced, the others followed, attracted by this new way of meeting their audience.

Evelyne’s Sales Secrets

Evelyne reveals her three-step method:

1. Assess the person: immediately adapt one’s behavior (voice, rhythm) to the interlocutor.

2. Listen to argue effectively: let them speak enough to gather the right arguments, but not too much to avoid repeated “no’s.”

3. Systematically close: never let an interview end without a next step.

Curiosity: The Foremost Quality in the World

Through her encounters with artists, Evelyne identified curiosity as the common thread among all exceptional talents. These people want to understand everything, know everything, read everything. This permanent curiosity is also, according to her, the primary quality of a salesperson.

This observation aligns with her conviction about the need to cultivate salespeople: providing them with a vast general culture, podcasts, conferences, and a keen understanding of the current business ecosystem.

In a nutshell…

Here are the three major takeaways from this Masterclass with Evelyne Platnic Cohen:

• Cultivate permanent curiosity: Like great artists, the best salespeople are insatiably curious.

• Master behavioral adaptability: Knowing how to adapt to your interlocutor to create the connection necessary for sales.

• Make sales a daily pleasure: True success lies in the pleasure of doing what you do, beyond external indicators.

Don’t miss the next Masterclass!