So You want to be in Sales

I do not know what makes people choose a profession.  Your life is a set of choices you make that has many different roads that we all travel.  Some roads are dead ends and some are short cuts, but eventually each of us chooses a path that works. Most talented sales people end up on the road less travelled.

I did not choose the sales path on purpose.  It chose me.  When I was 16 years old I skipped school, put on a suit, and used a pen and pencil sample case that I received from a company called Universal Press.  I read the stories about how I could get rich selling pens and pencils, and gave it a whirl.  17 days later I got caught and had to return to school.  I did make sales during my school vacation but I didn’t really know how I made those sales.  One sale I made was to a bank president for yard sticks.  I would just show the samples and somehow get an order.

Looking back it is hard to imagine a 16 year old selling anything but it happens every day.  Other things I sold before I was 21 was auto parts, newspapers, and men’s clothing.  If you have a natural and normal curiosity about the world and people that you meet, you might as well get paid well to do it.  No one is a natural born salesman.  It is a process that is repeated over and over.  It has been said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.

My first 10 years in sales was doing things modelled after people I knew and owners of small businesses.  Some of them had the right idea but didn’t have a developed process that was repetitive.   When selling men’s clothing in the mall we would have a contest to see how many good looking women we could lure into our store.  One of the techniques would be to walk out of the store into the mall holding a tie up in the air then asking the good looking women for just a minute to help me match colours of the tie with a shirt.  It worked every time.  Today when I am making calls and someone complements my tie, it is almost always one that my wife has picked out.  It is my belief that women have better colour perception.

In a department store that I worked in there was a sales lady that was a blue collar type person, that always had strife in her private life with a husband in a wheel chair and a son that was getting locked up at least once a month for getting drunk or getting in a fight.  (He is an outstanding citizen today.) Any time a person that she knew would walk in the store she would act like they were long lost friends she would laugh and say come over here.  I was just thinking about you because we just got in a blouse, skirt, ________(fill in the blank) that would look good on you.  I was naive and looked down on her techniques, but she outsold everyone in the store.

Until I worked for a professional sales driven company my sales training was hit or miss with no direction or real knowledge of what I was doing.  In future blogs I will lay out a process that you can use to improve your sales results.  If I can do it anyone can. It is easy to learn but difficult to use on a daily basis.  You have to practice your sales approach and make sure that you follow a sound process.