Welcome back WordPress, today I want to talk about my experience with failing in a sales job. I have been working a job in sales for the past two months and I have found this position to be much more challenging than originally anticipated. I am currently looking for a new job and so I decided that I wanted to reflect on some of the aspects of the job that did not work for me. The program that I will be addressing is labeled as a management training program. The position caught my eye because the company trains individuals to run their own business after a year within the program. All in all, I do not think that the program is necessarily bad but I did decide that it was not the right path for me.
What it is like to fail at a sales job.
- Perfecting Your Pitch
- Rejection Therapy
- Maintaining Your Attitude
Perfecting Your Pitch
To kick off the training, the first thing that the company teaches you is competitor knowledge. Almost every other customer that you interact with will already have a service provided by your competitor. Your duty is to understand the competitors service well enough to convert the customer towards your service. You do this type of persuasion through what is known as your pitch. Your pitch is your money maker, if you mess up your pitch you will probably mess up the sell. Additionally, a pitch is typically made up of an introduction, some eye contact, some small talk and then finally some presentation of your product. Ironically enough, I was actually really good at my pitch. This was the most frustrating aspect of the job for me because I felt like I had refined a fantastic pitch that was just not pulling enough customers. Most customers that I interacted with were usually responsive to humor and straight up details of the service. Eventually once I started to become a little demoralized, I would adapt my pitch into a straight up conversation. At times like these I would find the conversations I had much more rewarding than the rejection I would receive after trying to sell them something.
Rejection Therapy
Now that I may piggyback off of rejection, lets talk about the mental stress that comes with being told no all day long. Oddly enough, this was the most rewarding part of the job for me. I am someone who is constantly trying to push themselves to overcome a seemingly uncomfortable situation. I often times pride myself on being good at being alone. This is not a depressing statement but rather I think this is an important quality for someone who can become self-motivated. Therefore, this preconceived belief that I had about myself was deconstructed whenever I was surrounded by people who did not want anything to do with me. I already felt intrusive pitching to people who seemed busy and so this made it even harder of a fall whenever I would get rude responses from people who were genuinely bothered by my presence.
Q: You know whats more lonely than being alone?
A: Being surrounded by people who will not even acknowledge your presence… and then being tasked with selling something to them.
Cole Lamkins
Maintaining Your Attitude
Perspective is one hell of a life changer. I came into work thinking that I was a salesman. The high-rollers in the office were coming into work thinking they were customer service representatives who offered solutions to service problems. Can you see the difference in how each of those sentences make you feel. That one flip in mindset was all that it took to change their work lives for the better. I saw their paychecks and I knew exactly why they were maintaining that mindset. If I could not offer a service that was better than what my customer was already receiving, than I did not feel comfortable making that sell. These ladies and gents on the other hand truly believed that the service we offered was superior. This means that they believe that they are helping each and every customer make a superior financial decision that would benefit both the seller and the customer. I asked a couple of these high-rollers how they maintained their attitudes. The average answer was that it was mostly willpower. They said that they were like completely different people outside of work. I understood this because I would come home mentally exhausted from putting up a friendly mask all day long that would help me make sales. This is where I found that my work was conflicting with my aspirations of cultivating a creative spark on my free time. This is why I failed at sales, and this is why it is important to fail in general.
To leave you all with some food for thought. In my two weeks notice I recently asked the oldest coworker in the office some advice for living out my twenties. My co-worker responded by saying:
“You are too young to not be making mistakes. Make mistakes while your young and that is what will help you grow.”
Jim James
“Failure is only a stepping stone towards the path to success. Without failure we would not understand growth.”
Cole Lamkins
Semi-Poetic 