Sometimes we get so surprised by what someone says or does to us that we don’t immediately know how to react. This was one of those situations.
“Congratulations, you’re in sales now. Plan on being in San Antonio next Thursday for a demonstration,” announced my boss during our morning sports catch-up.
No one asked me if I wanted to be in sales. What did this mean? How do I sell? The fear of doing the sales call and a demo (which I’d never done before either) hadn’t really sunk in yet.
The real source of anxiety fogging my mind was this unexpected and unrequested career move.
How Do You Sell?
“Calm down, David, you’ll do just fine,“ came the unnerving words of my boss and half-owner of our company. Seated across from my boss, my nervous bouncing leg caused ripples in the coffee of the cups placed on the desk separating us. He thought I was worried about the meeting and the demonstration. That was certainly on my radar of worries but not near as much as trying to figure out what being a sales guy meant.
“How do I do my job now that I’m in sales?” I asked my boss again. This was the third trip to his office and about the hundredth question so far. Each time during the retreat back to my office, the obvious questions I should have asked instantly came to mind. My boss’s responses were so confusing they caused instant brain lock.
Can I Get a Straight Answer?
On the first return trip back to his office, I got this perplexing answer.
“You know a thousand times more about our software than a prospect,” he explained. My heretofore unrecognized talent level, provided an odd, yet ephemeral sense of comfort. The confidence booster evaporated before I plopped in my office chair.
“What does my knowledge of the software have to do with selling?” I kept asking myself. Not one to shy away from shame or an admission of failure, I returned to my boss’s office for round two of quizzing.
This time, my queries were well-formed, or so I thought. Surely learning how to sell could be found in a book. There were probably dozens of sources with sage advice about selling. He suggested a book he’d recently finished.
“The best book on sales I’ve ever read,” my boss proclaimed.
“Holy crap, what a stroke of luck,” I thought. Reading this tome a time or two would set me on the course of knowing how to sell. The book endorsement sent a flash of relief coursing through my rattled brain. The sureness of my potential sales acumen disappeared on my weak-legged shuffle back to my office.
There I sat, a lost puppy look on my cheerless face, twitching from side to side in my chair centered across from my boss. He didn’t look too thrilled with my third appearance in his office in the past hour. His patience with me was as thin as my sales ability at this point.
“What am I supposed to do every day now that I’m in sales?” I asked with a pale, shallow look of desperation on my face.
He paused for a long time, appearing to give the query careful thought. Over the two years at the company, I’d never witnessed my boss get flustered or even raise his voice. His unbothered mannerisms always lowered the stress level of any meeting in which I participated. He appeared to be contemplating the perfect answer to keep me the hell out of his office.
The Secret Sales Tablets
My boss explained that he didn’t want to see me in the office but one day a week. He continued my sales education by informing me to visit every one of our clients. When I was done, I was supposed to do it all over again. And I needed to be sure to ask if they could refer me to anyone who might have a need for our product.
Now I was really getting nervous. After further thought, my boss listed a few of our clients to visit every month. Then, his patience ran dry. I’m a little slow but not stupid. It was time to leave his office.
During my exit, he tossed one final piece of sales genius at me.
“Don’t let me catch you in a movie theatre during work hours or I’ll fire you on the spot!”
“Why the hell would I be in a movie theatre?” I fired back. He was laughing through his explanation. This sales gem came from his former manager at another company. Over time, my boss filled in the backstory of this wacky sales warning.
“I don’t care if you spend your time in a bar all day,” he told me. “You actually have a chance to meet someone who might turn into a sale at a bar. You’ve got no chance of meeting anyone at a movie.”
Going to a movie wasn’t high on my list of fun things to do on the weekend, but hanging out at a bar soundly like a pretty good gig. Being the literal type, I contemplated the chances of running into someone at a bar who needed oil and gas accounting software. Slim to none seemed to be the answer.
A Demonstration Disaster
In case you’re wondering what happened at my first sales meeting, it didn’t go well…. at all. The contact at the prospect, a middle-aged lady who clearly didn’t want to spend time with me, was best described as hostile. She didn’t greet me. She didn’t thank me for coming to San Antonio.
What she did say was, “You’ve got 60 minutes and that’s it.”
It didn’t seem possible for the toxic atmosphere in the conference room to get worse. The air passage in my throat shrunk to the size of a spaghetti noodle. The two small-talk comments I tossed out while waiting for my luggage-sized Compaq to boot up elicited no response. The tie around my neck felt like a hangman’s noose, getting tighter every time I spoke. It didn’t take long for the slow-motion train wreck that was my sales meeting to jump the tracks. Right after the first screen of the software appeared on the glowing orange display of my luggable computer, she hit me with a non-stop barrage of questions, none of which I could answer.
Trying to Do a Demo and Listen Is Hard
One thing became very clear. Doing a demo and attempting to answer questions was really hard. Even though my boss told me I knew a thousand times more about our software than our prospects, he failed to mention I didn’t know jack shit about how the software related to our client’s business problems. That missing nugget of information exposed me like a new private thrown at the feet of a hardcore Marine drill sergeant. Running out of the conference room seemed like a reasonable option at the time.
Mercifully, she hit the emergency brake on the demo train wreck.
“You wasted my morning,” she barked.“Leave now.”
I’d never experienced total failure like this before or since this first sales encounter. The prospect of explaining this disaster to my boss was unnerving.
The Walk of Shame
The march into my boss’s office the next day was filled with dread and embarrassment.
“The demonstration lasted about two minutes before I was drowning in questions I couldn’t answer,” I recounted.
Before I could continue, he yelled for the other owner of our company to come and hear about my experience. Both guys laughed uncontrollably while I bared my rookie sales soul. Apparently, they both found it to be one of the funniest stories they’d ever heard.
Set up for Failure
Then, my boss told me about the contentious conversation he had with this lady. In all his years of selling, he’d never encountered a bigger jerk of a person.
She called to inquire about our software, but it turned into a weird debate. During a 15-minute call, she told him to stop trying to sell to her over ten times. Somehow, my boss still managed to talk her into visiting with me, the new sales guy, to see a demo of our product.
I was actually pissed off at this point, yet relieved at the same time.
“Was this a charade for your entertainment?” I shot back at my boss. More people walked into the office to learn what all the cackling was about. My boss assured me I would never experience anyone like that again. His statement has proved to be true so far.
