There’s a famous tale of involvement with which many moons ago I was regaled by a b-school lecturer.

They way I first heard it, a manual labourer was busy scrubbing the outside of the Saturn V launch super-rocket with a long-handled brush. A passing dignitary asked what they were doing.

“I’m helping put a man on the moon”.

It’s a great anecdote. With the 50th anniversary of “one giant leap” today the story is all across the web as a janitor with a broom being asked on a 1962 Nasa visit by then American President Kennedy no less. Whatever its true status of legend doesn’t seem to matter. The earth is flat, the moon landings were a hoax, Elvis lives. Purpose, buy-in and participation shines forth.

I was delighted to learn of another group of utterly committed colleagues elsewhere among the 400,000 or so collaborating on the choosing not to do the easy, but the hard.

Apollonauts.

They were the team of coders writing the software of the Guidance Navigation System. Since lauded for cramming so much into such little space including critical failsafes, alarms and overrides.

Especially when the infamous 1202 Program Alarm sounded. Which in itself is a great selling steer. Note the Cheat Sheet from the day and how any bid process ought have similar. Think unreturned calls, meeting non-attendance, key person access denied, lack of forum choice, quid pro quo action absence, mind-changing, or left-field spec creep.

Anyway, as I’ve a close affinity for the argonauts of yore, here’s a definition pulled off the internet;

naut is a generic Suffix meaning traveller or voyager. It comes from nautes, the Ancient Greek word for sailor, and can also be used to describe anyone exploring, or having a very keen interest in something.

Any pursuit with a vowel-like sound ending or a more abrupt one from which an added ‘o’ can follow could benefit from the affix of this suffix.

In selling we often have such an enterprise which would undoubtedly benefit from such neologistic labelling. Even get your team to proffer their preferred equivalent.

The fun can provide reserves of fuel to avoid crashing into craters with the attribution of relevant values and traits too.

A flightplan element for your latest sales endeavour to achieve escape velocity and stay in orbit for as long as you need.