Other essays in this series:
This essay is part of a book I'm writing on sales. I can't tell you when or if it will be published, but I thought you might enjoy watching it emerge in real-time.
It's not that there aren't a trillion books out there on selling. There are (well, certainly hundreds). So if you're thinking about jumping to another page because you're pretty sure you've read everything there is on sales, I understand. But having been at selling and teaching others to sell for nearly 25 years, I've convinced myself that I have something useful to say on the topic, particularly if you're new to selling.
This chapter will probably sit somewhere near the front of the book. It's a story about how I got into sales. I doubt that reading it will make you sell better, but I know I think it's interesting!
A Peddler’s Tale
No parent falls asleep at night hoping and praying that his or her son or daughter will grow up to be a salesperson. A doctor, lawyer, judge, or successful business executive, but no, no, please not a sales person! At least that was my experience.
My mother was a teacher before she was a mother. Her parents were both teachers, one high school, the other a university professor.
My father was a very successful and prominent attorney. His father was a self-made man who died wealthy and made his money as an accountant and made his wealth investing in real estate, Broadway shows, and stocks—or two out of three.
So there was nothing in my background suggesting that I would spend the better part of my adult life selling and talking about selling.
When I was a kid, I thought I might be an architect. That was after I had entertained notions of big game hunter and fireman and before I had some vague sense that I might want to be a lawyer like my father.
Like many of my peers, I finished high school and went to college with no particular sense of direction other than to get out of town. When forced to declare a major, I settled on political science major. It seemed to fit with the whole lawyer thing.
Halfway through college I turned 18. My good Uncle Sam mailed me a draft card with a troublingly low number so that I might join the fun way down yonder in Viet Nam. By the time I finished college, and thus my draft deferment, the helicopters had all gone home and there was no more non-war to fight. By that time I no longer wanted to be an attorney. I also had no idea what I would do with myself.
My First Job
My first post-college job was working for a chain of backpacking stores called Nippenose. This was at a time when backpacking had become quite popular, largely in response to the emotional overhang of the big oil shocks of the mid-seventies. It was a funny choice for me. Not only didn’t I know anything about North Face down vests, Gerry backpacks, and Galibier Superguide boots, but I didn’t particularly care. In fact, I didn’t especially like being outdoors.
But I needed a job. Four years of college hadn’t gotten me any closer to knowing what I wanted to do other than NOT be a lawyer. It never occurred to me to wander over to Kodak or ring up Proctor & Gamble. I didn’t want to go into the Foreign Service. I wasn’t trained to do anything useful. Through an odd set of circumstances I got offered the chance to be the assistant manager of a new store opening in my home town. So I took it. It paid $800 a month and I lived at home. And that was how I got into sales.
At Nippenose, I worked for a guy named Pete. On my first day he handed me a stack of blank 3x5 cards and a pen and told me to write down the key selling points of everything in the store. I can’t remember how many individual items we sold, but it was a lot, and it took me a couple of weeks of reading catalogs and hang tags, listening to the other people sell, and asking lots of questions to work it all out. But I did it. Hundreds of 3x5 cards. I didn’t know a feature from a benefit or if the difference even existed or mattered (it mostly doesn’t) and Pete didn’t either. And that was that. That was my sales training.
I couldn’t claim any particular talent at selling in those days. I didn’t know to ask questions. I did know to be polite and I tried my best to tell people what I knew. I can also remember being completely intimidated by our higher end gear. For example, we had a North Face tent that cost something on the order of $400. That was half a month’s salary for me. It felt like a King’s ransom. It felt impossibly rich to me, so I couldn’t imagine that anyone would think otherwise.
It turns out that selling from your own pocketbook is a bad idea. Was then, is now. It’s a point worth highlighting (get out your pen now). One day a guy walked in, pointed at the tent, said he wanted it, and that was that. I wrote up the order, took his money, and thought I was the prince of sales. Imagine that. I had sold a $400 tent. Well, not really, but once I wrote up that order I got the idea that other people didn’t necessarily think $400 was a lot of money. Then I sold a lot more. Imagine that!
My First Real Sales Job
I quit Nippenose after a bit more than a year to work as a carpenter. That’s not quite accurate. I quit, didn’t know what else to do (a common theme for a liberal arts major right out of school), and caught on as a carpenter working on renovating a theater. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was getting $9 an hour under the table, so it was a pay raise. My father was beside himself.
There’s more to that story but it’s not worth telling here. After a year of swinging a hammer I moved to Hawaii to start a coffee company with two college pals. It went on to be very successful. I went on to do something else before it got that way. There’s no accounting for the native wisdom of a 24 year old.
All of this leads me to my first outside sales job—one where you get in your car and go call on people. In my case, I answered an ad in the paper for a company that consulted to small businesses. The advert promised professional sales training and the chance to make $70,000 in your second year. In 1981, coming from a string of $800 a month jobs, that seemed like an impossibly large sum of money.
The hiring seminar was intoxicating. All those attractive, self-confident people dressed in nice conservative suits talking about all the money they were making. If you’ve seen this movie, you know how the rest turns out.
I went to work there the next Monday. I was told how to dress. I was given a pitch to memorize and a slick pitch book to whip out in front of prospects. I was assigned a territory and sent out to cold call. If I tried, and I don’t want to, I could, over twenty years later, still do the pitch.
The company was a consulting company that aimed to sell services to small businesses. The company, like so many other small businesses, later went out of business but that didn’t stop the founder from writing a best selling business book and making pots of money on the speaking circuit.
My first job was to sell something called a “needs analysis.” Basically I was an appointment getter for someone else. I’d drive to my territory, stopping along the way at some public restroom to throw up, park my car, and then proceed to walk into small business after small business, thrusting out my business card as I did, and ask in my most confident voice, “Hi, is the owner or manager here?”
We were promised that if we followed the script exactly and made 25 cold calls a day, we’d get to talk to ten people and we’d reliably set three appointments a day. Appointments for what? For someone more senior than us to come in and use a scripted set of questions (the answers to which really he really didn’t care about) in order to set up a sale for a $395 (or maybe it was $495) half day workshop at the company headquarters on how to get your business organized.
If all that worked, if the second guy was able to sell the seminar seat, the person setting the original appointment—in this case me—would get paid. I forget how much—I know it wasn’t very much, but when I signed up, it all seemed to make sense.
You have to picture what all this looked like to the customer. Imagine you were some guy named Fred running an automotive body shop. That was typical of the kind of business I was calling on. There you were in fixing some car or trying to figure out your bank statement, your Doberman Pincher dog asleep in the doorway, when some fresh scrubbed kid in a three-pieced suit and wingtip shoes carrying a briefcase showed up wanting to know if the owner or manager was in. Who do you think they thought I was? FBI? Immigration? The tax man? If I was lucky, a sales person.
Needless to say, this was tough going. I set zero appointments that first week. Nobody did. Nevertheless, I gutted it out and wound up setting records for the number of appointments set. In a hiring class of twelve, I was the star. The only problem was that the guy following me, the one who was there to turn my hard won appointments into seminar seats was a boob. He didn’t sell diddly so I didn’t make diddly.
But because I was a star, they promoted me (and him). So now I was the guy selling seminar seats behind someone else’s appointments. Except the company decided about that time to change the compensation plan. Now it was paying the appointment getter $10 for each appointment set, which seems like a fair deal until you became the person following on. What I soon found out was that the newly minted appointment getters were basically begging the business owners to see me so they could get paid. They didn’t have to buy anything, just see me. The business owners knew that. My colleagues had broken rank and ratted out the process. In technical terms, we had something called “goal conflict.” You don’t want to be in a situation like this.
Anyway, the game was up before it got started. I sold my tail off and got nowhere. In fact, after three months of this I had made $1850, which was a step down from what I had made hawking sleeping bags except now I was married and living in San Francisco, instead of single and living with my parents in Rochester, New York.
Around the time I was doing that bit of math, the company came up with yet another new sales model and a yet another new compensation schema, which like the other two I had already lived through, they guaranteed would work.
I quit. About 18 months later, the company went bust (but not because I left). The founder went on to a much more successful career writing and speaking about how to run a successful small business. I’ve always found that ironic—what with his small business failing and all--but he’s sold over 1 million copies of his book, so who am I to say.
Facing the Music
This seeming flameout left me in a bit or a twist. The company had promised that it had a proven success system. “Do everything we tell you and you will make money. Keep doing it and you’ll soon be making a lot of money.” They promised. I did it to the letter. I was wildly successful at my part. Someone else wasn’t. I didn’t get paid. I dipped further into my savings account.
If I’m belaboring the point, please understand my purpose. Only the details are different here. I know lots and lots of people whose first job in sales wasn’t materially different than mine. “Do what I tell you to do and everything will be alright.” The surrogate parent in the form of boss telling the eager-to-please kid (one that might even have college loans) how to be a success.
Taking this closer to the bone, the question I found myself asking was this: Was it me or the system? Was I a failure—as a salesperson and/or human being—or was it the company? Did I screw up, or were they clueless?
These seemed like legitimate questions, even if the answer was a forgone conclusion assuming I had any shred of self-worth left. They were the screw-ups, not me. And in fact, over twenty years later with the benefit of a lot of hindsight and deeper understanding of how selling works, I’m still convinced I was right on that point.
Like many sales managers and politicians before and since, the folks at the small business consulting company over-promised and under-delivered on their part. Because they hadn’t really done the math on their hiring and developmental costs, they were willing to live with high turnover in their sales force. What they didn’t bank on is that over time, that same turnover would damage their brand and ultimately cripple their ability to support the kind of growth the company was looking for. Without sales, they folded.
That later point is a business certainty. And as much as people like to denigrate sales people, and this includes a fair number of executives, it is sellers that pay the bills. Just ask all those former CEOs of all those failed techno-centric dot.com flame outs how they feel about sellers now.
As for me, I began a journey that continues to this day. I vowed to become an expert on why people buy and what people like me could do to help that process along. It began with reading lots of books on sales, influence, persuasion, self-esteem, and more and going to every seminar I could by all the sales luminaries of the day. A lot of it seemed interesting, but at that point, what did I know? I was a rookie.
If you take this route—reading the mainstream sales books—you’ll discover a lot of quoted, and sometimes lifted material. Some of this material is self-referencing. It comes from other materials the author has written, or from other sales gurus the author knows or otherwise traffics with. So I backtracked and read much of that “referenced” material as well.
The material I found most interesting came from academic sources with no obvious connection to sales, what I came to regard as the real bedrock material. I read Jung. I read everything I could find on neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and transactional analysis. I read Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, von Moltke, and Rommel on military strategy. I read Joseph Campbell on heroic journeys. I read Robert Cialdini on Influence and Everett Rogers on diffusion of innovation. I read Michael Porter on value chains. I read Mike Hammer on reengineering the corporation. I read Christensen on innovation. I became a student of selling, influencing, negotiating, and most of all, human behavior. I read it all.
More than reading it, I was crazy enough to try it out. If I read or heard something that seemed to make sense, and a lot of times even if it didn’t, I’d go try it out on someone. I talked business theory with people who were willing. I tried out unified theories of reality. And I also tried some pretty crazy sales tactics, many of which I wouldn’t touch today with a ten foot pole, but all of which helped me understand human interactions and what worked and what didn’t, at least for me. In short, I created what I couldn’t find anywhere else: The College of Selling at Kevin University.
And you know what? In the process of all this reading and bumbling around, I learned how to sell. More importantly, I learned a style of selling that I was comfortable with and that made my customers comfortable. It was a style that also bothered others, but I figured that was okay too. It helped me weed out people early on that just weren’t going to buy from me anyway. Remember, I believe and believed that people buy from people.
Send mail to
webmaster@kevinhoffberg.com
with questions or comments about this web site. Copyright © 2004 Kevin
Hoffberg
Last modified:
05/03/06