You Only Get What You Give: Making the Sales World Better

My first sales job was with a large company that had a sales force of 250 reps, many of whom (like me) were hired off the street with little to no sales experience. One of the benefits of this size and structure was that we had a corporate sales trainer, Pete, to put us noobs through sales boot camp in hopes we’d learn how to sell.

The way it worked was, you’d ‘learn’ the sales methodology-which in mid 2000s terms was just a bunch of acronyms like “SAFT” and “DICA” that comprised our proprietary sales process-at your local branch before getting shipped off for the real test of sales skills: a few days up at some random hotel in suburban Minneapolis in a boiler room of your ostensible peers getting schooled by Pete on every facet of our sales progression and philosophies…all leading up to a pressure-packed role play where you would either get certified by corporate or sent back to your branch in shame.

(Or fired. Some knucklehead would always do something dumb at night to get fired up there. It never failed, it was just a question of 'when' and 'what'.)

And Pete was great at his job. So great, in fact, that I still think about him all the time and utilize a ton of his methodology to this day. He was a taskmaster in the same way a lot of good teachers are: he demanded excellence in the classroom and pushed us out of our comfort zone to do better through very strenuous examinations of our sales competence. It was a hard and frustrating, but effective, way to learn how to sell the way the company-and probably mostly Pete himself-wanted us to sell.

And while this led to some irritation and anger in the heat of the moment, Pete would also always be the first one to take you out and buy you some wings and a few beers when the role play was over. That was the true indicator you’d mastered his teachings forever and earned his respect. And once you did, Pete was a great resource and always a big help for the rest of your tenure.

And yeah, while it was quite literally his job to teach young sellers a process, it wasn’t just that, not for him. I truly always thought that he approached his role not out of a sense of an occupation, but more out of an obligation to leave the organization’s sales force in a better place the longer time went on. ???

Anyway, I bring this up not just to talk about Pete, although he certainly deserves the tribute, but because I think it speaks to the larger point about paying it forward in the sales profession:

I believe we have a duty to help make the next generation of sellers better than we are. ?

When I say ‘we’ above, I don’t necessarily mean everyone who may be reading this. Everyone is at a different phase of their career. What I mean by ‘we’ is that it does apply if you feel you have something to give, some knowledge to impart, some person to mentor, some training to lead. If any of this sounds like you, give it whenever you can. That’s the duty.

Because, as a steward of our sales environment, much like the planet itself, we should want it to be better than it is now. It’s only going to lead to more profitable companies, better customer experiences and outcomes, more engaged salespeople who make more money, and better sales cultures.

Sales is always evolving, and that’s fine. Many of the things that Pete trained me on nearly 20 years ago are somewhat obsolete today due to technology or buyer’s experiences, and that’s OK. Conversely, I led a training last week on overcoming objections that I basically plagiarized from what I learned back then. That’s OK too.

The point is, the training, the passing it on, the paying it forward, was an ethos that I was lucky enough to be exposed to through Pete, and it was clearly contagious. Because when I think about all the excellent salespeople and leaders that were exposed to his training and how many of them clearly took an interest in helping others learn the craft, it is the only logical explanation for it.

Passion about the profession, and helping others learn it and build on it, is what it is all about. It’s similar to how it takes young sales reps (myself certainly included back in the day) awhile to learn that they’ll actually sell more if they stop worrying about what’s best for them and worry about what’s best for the prospect instead. Helping the next generation is another “you only get what you give” scenario.

But I’m hard pressed to think of many careers that offer a better or more tangible one. It’s rewarding because you can truly see others blossom and grow and build on what you know and make it their own. It’s cool.

So please keep that in mind and do what you can the next time you’re asked to help out either formally or informally on your own paths.

Personally, I’m far from the trainer that Pete Swanson was, but I would like to think that I’m one of many out there honoring his legacy by doing what we can to make our own little sales universes as good as they can be.