Photo of puppeteer Jim Henson at the 41st Emmy Awards. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve personally seen this many times before but the internet is acting like they just discovered it so I thought it might be a nice thing to share.

Most people just know Jim Henson as the guy behind the Muppets but one of the reasons I’ve always loved him is that he wasn’t just a great creative mind, he was a innovative business man and a very effective salesman. (Why do you think so much of the Muppet material is so inspirational? He can also sell you on yourself.)

He used to have an actual, literal shrine to the almighty dollar in his office which just gives me joy.

I could talk about Jim Henson as business role model all day but I’ll save it for another day. In the meantime, I thought my fellow sellers and marketers would enjoy seeing this great little video. This was a sales pitch that Jim Henson put at the end of the pilot episode of The Muppet Show when he was trying to selling it to CBS. It’s only about two minutes long but it’s worth watching several times just to see how he ratchets the sales pitch up and uses humor to get you to buy into what he’s saying and win you over to his idea. It would have been hard to say no to this and it’s a great lesson for would-be marketers everywhere.