What is an anti haul?
What is an anti-haul? An anti-haul is a sales tactic employed by some salespeople to minimize the amount of time and effort that a buyer has to spend on the phone. If a customer has to spend more time on the phone, then there are less of those free coupons and discounts he could use. If he sees no opportunity for free stuff, he’d rather not go through all that hard work anyway in order to make sure the conversation goes well and that he gets what he wants out of it.
Anti-hauls are common in sales, but they can vary significantly from one person to another. Sometimes they are quite subtle while other times they are very overt. You can think of them as a form of negation: when you say “I don’t want anything” you might actually be saying “I don’t want any hassle talking me into buying anything at all.”
How to create your own anti haul video
This is a relatively new tool that is becoming increasingly popular among startups and entrepreneurs for its ability to enhance your marketing efforts, with the potential to turn into a full-time business.
This post from last year discusses the benefits of creating and using anti haul videos (and in particular, how to make one). You can check out the rest of this post here.
The idea behind anti haul videos is very simple: you want to create what looks like a traditional pitch video, but it isn’t. It’s more of a pitch for you as an individual, and it’s done in a way that suggests that you are being sold — not just by your product but by your company as well.
The key elements include:
• You leave the room (or even get out of the car)
• You have an objective (in terms of what, or who you are selling)
• You close with something that sits well with the audience
This type of video is usually used when there is no real product or service to sell, so people want to see what you do for them rather than just who you are and why they should buy from you. It also works great on pitches for other products as well.
The most famous anti hauls
Anti hauls, as they are described in the Hacker News’s HNH, are most commonly of the form:
“I made this thing using a new Rails gem for Rails 3.2 but I can’t find it on the vendor site. Can you help?”
The only problem is that there is no such thing as a “new Rails gem” and there aren’t many gems at all (as far as I know) that work with Rails 3.2. Also, even if there were a “new Rails gem,” which does not exist and which does not offer anything particularly unique or valuable for developers to use, it would be rather redundant because there are already so many gems out there that do exactly what we want them to do (or at least don’t do anything else).
In fact, some anti-hauls are actually quite funny. The guy who made the purple unicorn webapp with a Ruby on Rails webapp engine, designed by him alone – he was just kidding around. He didn’t even have any ruby-on-rails knowledge or any experience with webapps/webapps engines before he started his project!
And in other cases it is just plain stupid: http://codebewell.com/blog/2015/12/23/using-ruby-on-rails-in-your-website/. This is a blogpost about how to use Ruby on Rails in your website and it uses the following code snippet:
require ‘rubygems’ require ‘rake’ RUBY_ENV = “development” RUBY_ENV =~ /[^\.]+\.\d+(.*)/ if !RUBY_ENV .match( “^ruby(\d+)-ruby\.rb$”) elsif !RUBY_ENV .match( “^/(php|python|node|gem)$” ) else puts “Ruby environment is not set to Ruby 1.8” end end rake ‘test_library’ test_library(‘test’) rake test # returns something like this: # Gem::Status::Error: ERROR: You must have ruby installed # in order to run this command! at /usr/local/bin/rake[1] at /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/system/rubygems#require [‘rub
Conclusion
In this post, I have tried to make the case that because anti-hail is such a small point of friction in the supply chain, it is important for every company to understand how it can be reduced. One way is by focusing on reducing anti-hail at the point of origin. The other way would be to focus on reducing anti-hail at the point of shipping. We’ll only discuss the first approach here; but suffice to say that reducing anti-hail at any point along the supply chain (including in transit) will help reduce costs (and ultimately improve overall customer satisfaction).
Anti-hail is just one piece of what I call “good design”: design which makes things better in a number of ways. It is also a very difficult problem and so it pays to be thoughtful about every aspect of your supply chain and every step you take along it.