June 5, 2024–“Yuck. He is majoring in business and going into sales.”
Growing up in the hip1960s, there was no harsher judgement of a peer than was uttered in that statement. I remember hearing it from someone I admired, and it changed my future. No going into sales for this cool kid. I was Liberal Arts all the way.
It was reinforced early on, when a well-meaning mentor suggested I take advantage of an opportunity to sell life insurance at a small town in the Midwest. I literally laughed in her face, as I could in no fantasy envision myself knocking on farmers’ mudroom doors and getting them to sign whole life policies on their Formica kitchen tables.
No, I was going to be a drummer.
It was too many years later I realized I’d been wrong. Everything is sales. We are all sales people.
Let us take my first chose profession, music, as an example. When I was deep into my professional road warrior era, I quickly noticed the difference between successful bands making a living at it and the “play for beer” troubadours was all about selling. You had to get head shots, work the phones, and create contracts in order to get on the best stages. Then you had to sell yourself to the crowds inside those lounges if you wanted them to want you to come back.
When I got off the stage and back into the classroom, 90% of my job as a teacher was convincing my students that what they were learning mattered. Tough sales job, that. Ask any math teacher.
One of my teaching areas was Gifted and Talented. I had more than 120 students each working on an independent study. Their topics ranged from castles to fossils to medieval weaponry to the Olympics. Do you know how difficult it is to get 120 4th, 5th, and 6th graders to pursue and complete a different independent study? All were avid learners by default, but many balked at the work of documenting their sources and, mostly, putting together a final project to present what they learned to the public. Some built castles, some created newspapers, some choreographed dances.
I preached that no matter how smart you were, no matter how many facts you memorized, no matter what incredible life-changing invention you created, you might as well have stayed home watching The Price is Right if you could not somehow convince the vast unwashed of the value of your incredible life-changing invention. Karl Benz might have created the automobile, but it took Henry Ford to sell it.
One of my early clients and mentors explained that business–any business–as a pipeline. You get paid for all the product gushing out from the end of the pipe, but you always need to be running back to the other end to put stuff into it. Putting stuff into the pipeline is, yes, you guessed it, sales.
Not long ago, I had the opportunity to try a straight sales job. Unlike my primal fear of being an insurance salesman, I found that I kind of liked straight selling. The trick was to approach it as a game, something my little brother taught me. He looks at business like a real-world version of Monopoly. It’s pretend property, plastic buildings, and pink money. If you lose, you start over.
Sold.