(Ecns.cn)—With more than ten men gathered round him, the 38-year-old Liu Yimiao, dressed in white, walks into a room filled with music. He looks around and observes the audience, who then break into rapturous applause.
A man pours a cup of water for Liu, who raises one hand to quiet the room down. "Do you know why I let such an ugly man pour water for me? Because his look makes me more handsome," he says to the audience. "But I won't let just anybody to do the job, only someone with special qualities."
"The ugly man" is not a secretary of Liu's, but Gao Wei, a businessman who owns seven companies including the Tengfei Group, based in northern China's Hebei Province, and one secondary technical school.
"I promise, on this stage, that I won't drink the water of Brother Miao's (Liu's nickname known by his followers), and I am willing to dedicate my life to pouring water for Brother Miao" says Gao, who later admitted that he drank the water secretly in the hopes of "gaining the power of Brother Miao's."
The scene described above was not that of a cult ritual (despite the strong resemblance), and Liu Yimiao is not a spiritual leader. It was a lecture held at the Black Forest Hotel in Shenzhen, in southern China's Guangdong Province last month. Liu is a lecturer and motivational speaker, as well as the chairman of Sibada Education Group, a company that offers recruitment and lectures propagating business management doctrines for company heads and chief executives.
Although there is no epiphany or enlightenment in Liu's lectures, he is worshiped by his fans in a rather pragmatic way - one lesson costs each trainee up to 300,000 yuan ($46,500). Even fees for small classes, which are usually taught by Liu's "apprentices," can be as high as 2,500 yuan ($387).
At this three-day lecture held at the Black Forest Hotel, each trainee spent 50,000 yuan ($7,755) to attend Liu's lecture, a "real bargain" for those who wanted to see "Brother Liu" in person.
Persuaded by a "warrior"
Cui Junsheng is the general manger of a Beijing-based accounting firm. Like many other entrepreneurs in this country, Cui started from scratch – his company revenues are now more than 27 million yuan ($4.2 million), but he began his dream with only 2,000 yuan ($310) in 2005.
The 33-year-old Cui received a phone call from Sibada two years ago. As a very busy man, Cui hung up on "some salesperson promoting some business management lesson."
It turned out that Cui's guess was a serious underestimate. As the company's name, Sibada, is a Chinese homonym for Sparta, its salespeople, who are called "warriors," are not so easy to beat by a simple "no" or "I'm too busy to talk to you." Cui received their calls almost on a daily basis since the beginning of 2011. He finally surrendered to their persistence and decided to attend the lecture, just "to see what these crazy men are up to."
Zhang Chao, a 23-year-old former supermarket rice-seller, is one of the 5,000 Sibada warriors and a team leader. Every morning, Zhang and his fellow salesmen go through a certain ritual - reading Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World out loud, taking a bow to the salesman of the month, and chanting:"I swear I will make at least one sale today! Do it! Do it! Do it!"
The warriors' next fortress to conquer is businessman Liang Xiao'en, who lives in Taizhou, in eastern China's Zhejiang Province and has been hanging up on warriors for the last four years. "I will keep calling you until you show up at one of our lectures," the salesperson said to Liang.
To become the world's greatest salesman alone is certainly not enough fuel for such motivated warriors. They receive a commission of 1,000 yuan ($155) for each "small lesson" and 10% of the tuition fee for Liu's "grand lectures" (from 10,000 to 300,000 yuan).
