Let me make a confession: my name is Colin and I'm a salesman. There, I've said it - I hope you'll still be my friend. The reason I'm so reticent about it is that the British have a peculiar attitude towards selling. In a nutshell we like to make salespeople the butt of quite a lot of our humour, and we can adopt an air of superiority towards them, but at the same time we're happy to fill the jobs they create. Because there's the rub: most businesses wouldn't exist without salespeople generating the revenue and profit to keep them going.
I mention this because a friend made a comment the other day about a particular bunch of salesmen (and I mean men, or rather boys) and their unpleasant and raucous behaviour. The comment was along the lines of 'I'm so glad I'm not a salesperson', and it made me stop and think. There's a stereotype of the loud, brash, loadsamoney salesman, and these lads apparently fitted it to a T. Having said that, I've met plenty of exceedingly loud and annoying medics, extremely tedious lawyers, and don't get me started on the oddities of Estate Agents or Internet Developers!
I suspect the problem is that salespeople tend to be motivated by money, and that grates with typically British reserve. I spent 28 years selling: sometimes my title had sales in it, and at other times it didn't. When I was a Managing Director - which is a grand title in its way - the reality was that I was still chief salesman in the company. I may have done different sales calls on different and higher-powered punters, but I was still a sales rep with responsibility for the company's revenue targets.
It's different in the States. There selling is regarded as an honourable profession, but then in the US it isn't considered gauche to be open about wanting to earn a lot of money. In the US corporation where I spent a lot of my career, our sales recruits were almost 100% graduate, many with MAs or PhDs, and mainly from - and let's be a bit snobbish here - what were at the time the better universities. They were attracted to sales for a number of reasons: the money was obviously a factor, as was the intellectual challenge of selling complex IT systems into the country's largest companies in sales campaigns that took several months to come to fruition, and the buzz of winning was a big thing for many of them. However, the biggest factor by far was that their career couldn't progress unless they'd successfully sold. No-one at that time ever made it towards the top of that business unless they could boast a decent sales pedigree.
What's so great about selling - and it really isn't for everyone - is that it's a profession where you can't hide. You're either making your numbers and succeeding, or you're missing your target and - excuse me using the 'F' word - failing. In a world where the black and white of success and failure are increasingly replaced by shades of grey, sales maintains its standards. Look at the problems faced by companies during this so-called recession (if you want to know about real recessions try the early 80s and the early 90s - I've seen it all before), and a lot of them can be laid at the door of a culture where failure seemed to have been abolished as being in some way unpalatable! However it's dressed up, in business it's not enough to succeed, others must fail - by definition that's true, but people get uneasy when it's said.
A career in sales also makes people very resilient, and I suspect that follows through from their job into the rest of their life. Selling teaches you to handle setbacks and rejection - you get more of them in a typical week than many people get in their whole career. Some people can't handle that - they curl up and put their hands over their ears - but those who can, learn to pick themselves up, dust themselves down, and start all over again.
Watch David Mamet's play, Glengarry Glen Ross, and you'll get a handle on the elation and pain that salespeople cope with on a daily basis. Of course it's an extreme view of the world of sales, but it's not that over the top - you can trust me, I'm a salesman.
When I told my mother I was moving over from being a techie to become a salesman her attitude was typically British - in essence it was 'I'll still love you despite that'! I suspect a lot of her disquiet was down to her generation's understandable love of safety and security, and the thought of her son doing a job where there wasn't a guaranteed salary unsettled her.
If you earn your money working in a business that makes things or provides services - and outside of what we snootily call the professions or the public sector, most people do that - spare a thought for the salespeople who are out there 'doing the business' to keep you in a job. I make no apology for expressing it in such stark terms, but that's the reality of the business world - they may sometimes be loud, brash parodies of themselves, but we'd be in a sorry mess without them.
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