Sales 101

Friday. 6.30pm. I am sitting alone in a restaurant waiting  for my friend to come. The only table available when I got here was a table of four, right ahead of me is the door. I usually come here when I want a quiet time. Its ambiance is great for conversation. I was going to just go home and chill...but she persuaded me to meet her today.It feels odd to say chill without Netflix,lol...but that would be pretentious for two reasons, one, I don't have Netflix and two, I don't like Netflix....not so much because it is Netflix but just movies generally...Its very odd for me to be the one saying this because there was a time I literally knew about every new movie release. Or maybe I l still do like movies now that I think about it, is it okay not to know if you like something? The thing is, every time I intentionally try to watch one, I lose concentration, most of the time I just find myself hungry or sleepy for no apparent reason.....I digress. So I m here watching people going in and out of the restaurant but trying not to make it look obvious by typing this on my phone. Wait....my friend just texted that she is waiting to be picked by another friend who will drop her in town, it shouldn't be very long...20 minutes at most. Okay, so I have 20 minutes to figure out what this post is about, I am probably going to waste your time with this one but I have an idea, I will write about my past experience as a sales person. When I think about sales, one thing comes to mind, a quote I came across a few years ago 'If you want people to buy something, stomp on their greed buds until they bleed'' Not my words, not sure whose but they stuck with me. As a sales person, I needed this heuristic technique to keep me focused. In sales, you learn things like warm leads and cold leads. It is your job to identify the warm lead and convince them to buy.Not closing a sale with a prospective lead , is not an issue of luck, it is a terrible failure of will power.It is the same kind of willpower you need to stick to a vegetarian diet. This is the kind of radical approach you must take if you want to succeed in sales. 

It takes a lot of time to evolve into this radical sales person. As a newbie, reality will hit you in different waves of emotion. Happy, sad, angry or just despair. With time you will learn that it is not about you, whatever  cards you are dealt with you have to play them the best that you can. You will also learn that you have to show up...every day. Because you just don't know which is your lucky day, and most of all, you will learn to have some fun a long the way, you might have to serve up some fancy words you have heard your colleagues say, partly because, if there's a chance you will not close the deal,at least you'll have the satisfaction of tossing such vocabulary in the air...and while at it, you will learn not to let the absurdity of it all hover over you. 

Oh my tea is now cold,both literally and figuratively. It is 12 minutes later and I just got a text from my friend, the friend who had promised to pick her has not yet arrived ....she has decided to uber...

9.30 pm....I'm home. Chilling.   (Still not Netflix and chill lol.) I had a great time with my friend. I'm copying my sales 101 lesson to my blog, you know what? maybe I should have called it growing up 101. I'm off to bed now :)