Mom!! I Want To Be A Sales Person When I Grow Up

I am yet to meet a young boy or girl who says I want to become a sales person when I grow up. ;-)

They all wanted to be a doctor, engineer, scientist, ballet dancers, actors, pilot, astronauts or what not but no one wants to be a sales person. Poor Us. We are nobody’s aspirational material.  No one likes us in the first go. They need us and yet they say we are liars, over confident, manipulators, always presenting rosy pictures or hiding truth, deliberately creating fictitious situations to suit the narrative, arrogant, smart ass, posers and what not.

No other department likes us,

To Finance guys we are someone who don’t have sense of money (which we earned, of course), not collecting enough, not adhering to their P&L process, not understanding cost of money and most of all not filing our convenience and other reports in time, getting orders last minute just before the closing bells for the Day/Month/Quarter/Year throw on their tables and move out for the fag and putting them in a fix to do the hard work. (Trust me bringing order was not cake walk as well) of logging the order in to system. How come this discount was not approved by right authority (Your boss is not proper authority… pfff and here I was thinking he was God). There is no profit in it. We could have made or we should have made more money.

Manufacturing always hates us for not selling what they have made rather demanding something which is not there, not giving them enough time to prepare it (why can’t you give projections), not understanding component supply schedule, not selling enough to match their output.

HR hates us for not being there in trainings, not completing the boring performance reviews, not filing enough paper work, and not switching off that damn mobile in day long boring training at “how to sell” instead we are interested in closing the deal in hand.

MIS hates us for asking too much data, historical trends, not those ready made reports but we need it in light of our thought process.

Operations: its implementation nightmare. hates us for not giving enough time to act though they were sitting on the order for 7 days till finance finally approved it and in the mean while we have been requesting them to gear up as we knew we would make it sail through (if not you some other boss up in ladder will approve it with minor understanding or confidence giving or through a mail from client) . Now they talk of implementation in XX time is impossible and want us to go back to client and extend it on PO before they log in the order. 7 more days passes ;-). Obviously we hate each other. Once order logged in we shall divert few nasty calls to them as revenge.

Service hates us for agreeing to impossible service standards. However those service standards are already well agreed upon, but they hate us for agreeing to it once more and some verbal commitments which we did during negotiation, like we will keep enough service spares for them separately which service wont maintain and in variably use those spares for other clients and then hate us. We might request them to use it for other important client. Or simply we do quick escalations all the time. We ought to be hated.

Marketing hates us for asking too much material or funds or colletoral or events and never giving feedback. Each even should produce enough $ to cover the exences (wonder what happened to plain vanilla brand building exercise)  

Every other staff envy us for that incentive which we sometimes earn and see that unfair on them. Even office boys hates up for asking too much coffee or tea.

Bosses hates us for obvious reasons. We hate our juniors for the same thing. All of the above put together and we never have enough pipeline or prospects or hot cases or planning or orientation in life or goals or want to become him (as if we are dying for it).  

Who got you in sales our bosses scream at times (and we prevent ourselves from saying that boss you selected us in 4 round interview process)

To every department's surprise actually we do appreciate you and thank you all the time, probably more than anyone else in organisation. Just that our methods are different. i good sales person always empathize and understand every department's contribution in our success. But we are wonderful persons. People wants to become us but are afraid that they won’t be able to, because of so many drool worthy qualities. For all other departments in organization there is an education or training or a process to learn and you can become personnel of that department obviously on job knowledge and experience happen over time in all departments but there are some basic qualifications or specific studies which can get you entry.

In case of sales, there is nothing. During MBA no one studied sales (90% of MBA in marketing end up being sales executive) obviously those who could not get a seat in engineering or Medical or any other competitive exam and even could not pass Ivy league MBA institute entrance. But we are different person over a period of time.

Often I am posed with a question that sales people are different they are born for sales. They have different persona and personality. A true blue sales person is born not made. I beg to differ here. To my understanding everyone of us is a sales person. Every kid is selling his ideas to get his way to parent, or a wife or husband finding his ways with his partner or in every human interaction there is an amount of sales involved active or passive. Just some of us make a living out of it.

There are skills which are to be mastered in case you decide or land up in a sales job. I specifically said land up as for a lot of us sales is not their first choice. Even the brightest of us all somehow landed up here as well. Twist in Tail. It does not matter how you land up there. Just a matter of degree in preparedness can make all the difference.

So we land up there. And trust me it’s not a bad place to be, in fact within any organization we are primary bread winners. Of course supported by every function of organization every department each nut and bolts. Because we are greedy, we need everyone to work with us to get us that precious order. That piece of paper (now email of course) which has $ sign at the bottom. It’s all about how efficiently and regularly we get that.

We sharpen our skills over period of time, learning by doing and following out seniors. Learning from each and everyone in our way, improving upon ourselves, getting to know our strengths and weaknesses and seeking help is what makes us who we are. When it’s a technical meeting we will reach out to the most efficient tech guy (of course we will cut him in between for divulging too much technical knowledge), or we will gather a big team to impress upon the buying committee and speak more than anyone else.  We spend time on our grooming, confidence, market know-how, competitor analysis or just to read weather reports in order to break ice in a new meeting. We are feet on street to get firsthand practical information about everything happening around us. (Later our bosses will tell us we don’t know a shit and not enough grounded)

We are talkative, charmer, story tellers, full of life experiences, cracking jokes, extroverts, going out on cigarette breaks even when we don’t smoke. Tea stalls are our favorite hanging grounds, we know about every good road side food stall worth knowing, we are hated because receptionists love us as we have developed habit to chat with every other  receptionists while waiting for clients or digging information or just like that. Where in operations ignore them and finance guys don’t know they exist (too many numbers in mind).

We live by targets always on the edge, rush of closing a tough deal, anxiety of not meeting the numbers, getting overly excited over just making an entry in to an account, always seeing the bigger picture (which sometime don’t even exist), optimistic, cheerful and happy go lucky.  Cheerful after a tough sales review or after being raped we console each other by (what the fuck he knows, you are wonderful and he is an idiot for not recognizing that), bouncing back too often. No education just training ourselves or learning traits of good human good leader, emotional intelligence good person makes us who we are.

I wonder why I did not say “Mom I want to be a sales person when I grow up.”