Traveling Salesman - The Journey to Success

Soul Of A Salesman

In 1981 Tracy Kidder wrote a landmark book that won the Pulitzer Prize entitled, "Soul of a New Machine." It is the true story of the 1970s computer company Data General, a company on a quest to create the next great computer to compete against the, then reigning champion, Digital Computer Systems, commonly known as DEC. To accomplish their goal the company went about computer design in a whole new way. They created two competing engineering groups, giving each crew the clear message, "may the best team win." They isolated both teams from the minutiae of the day so they could spend all their energy on creating the next great computer. They set horrendous deadlines for the developers believing it would motivate them to do their best work. And, perhaps most interesting of all, they threw the top-down management book out the window, believing that small groups of five or six engineers could do the work of twenty if given the freedom and support to create, instead of simply code. In their quest to build the next great computer they went looking for the soul of the new machine in unexpected places. They went about solving a complex problem in a very unusual way. Becoming a great sales person is like this. Sales skills alone will not make you a superstar. Memorizing a book on some new sales paradigm will not insure your success. Thinking sales looks easy and convincing yourself that anyone can do it is a recipe for disaster. If you want to be successful in sales then you will have to dig far deeper into your psyche than you have ever gone before. Becoming a great sales person is all about discovering your sales soul. It cannot be identified or measured, quantified or reasoned, discovered or disclosed, yet, you know it when you have it. Your sales soul is what makes you great; finding and keeping it is the lifelong journey.

This book is about finding and nurturing your sales soul. It comes from thirty years of selling experience. It is a book filled with success and failure, loss and discovery, peril and promise. This is a book for salespeople, about the selling profession, written by a salesman. It is not of the "how to" variety but rather the "how it happened." It is a mixture of travelogue, selling situations, lessons along the way, and self confession. In order to help you discover and nurture your sales soul I have to first get inside your head--by letting you inside of mine. I accomplish this through telling "real life" sales stories.

I want to take you on a personal journey through my eyes: seeing what I saw, feeling what I felt, and learning what I learned. I cannot make you successful in sales-only you can make yourself successful. But I do believe I can help you discover and develop the critical skills and knowledge you need to be a success. Anyone can learn the basics of selling but learning to love selling is something completely different. Trying to explain what being in love feels like has been a challenge of the ages. Trying to explain what makes a salesperson successful-or not-is a similar problem. It's not as simple as one, two, three, easy steps to success. But if that isn't the answer, what is? Good question. Difficult to explain. Through my stories I try give you a sense of what it takes to be successful. Instead of telling you "how to do it" I share with you "what I did." So call it a mentoring book, if you will, intended to help you through your journey into sales. What makes this book different is that I share with you the intimate details of what the inner life of selling is all about. I expose my soul in order to help you discover yours.

Some of the names have been changed to protect the guilty and to leave the innocent in quite seclusion. Several of the names have been left in-tact. These are the people who have shaped my life and shared in my adventures. My parents are prominently featured throughout the book. They were the ones who set me up for a life in sales; they just didn't know it at the time. And finally, I have tried to recall the conversations herein to the best of my ability. Like all memories, mine are open to personal recall. Every "if, and, or but" may not be exact, but every word comes from inspired remembrance.

I was not born a salesman, nor will I die one. I was born an impressionable child who grew up in a working class neighborhood in a small town in eastern Washington. I will die, God willing, surrounded by family and friends, reflecting on my life as a husband, father, and salesman. Selling has been my rock in every sense of the word, "with no direction home," as Bob Dylan would say, "into the complete unknown."

There is a beautiful short story by the Finnish author Tove Jonsson, entitled "The Rock." It is less than six pages in length yet a beautifully crafted story of a life complete. Based on the myth of Sisyphus (a recurring theme throughout my book), the storyteller takes us on a journey of discovery and innocence where a rock discovered changes everything. "It was lying between the coal dump and the goods wagons under some bits of wood and it was a miracle no one found it before me," she writes in the opening line of the story, "It was a huge stone of nothing but silver and no one had found it." The story is a childlike tale about what it takes to roll the rock into existence. It is heavy. It takes all she can do to move it. People she meets along the way, stop and stare. It won't budge when she needs it to. She even abandons it for awhile deciding it is simply too big, too hard, too difficult, to handle. But in the end she preservers and the rock finally breaks wide open, revealing the miracle within.

My life in sales has been like that rock. I didn't ask to find it, but it somehow found me. And there it remained, constantly in my vision regardless of where I stood, or how far away from it I tried to run. In religious terms, it became my cross to bear. The rock of sales knew it was only a matter of time until I discovered it was my calling to push it through life and up the proverbial hill, discovering the essence of who I was meant to be along the arduous journey.

The sales journey is not for everyone. You may discover that you don't have a desire for sales. You passion may lead you in a different direction. As I say throughout the book, "many are called, but few are chosen." Everyone has a destiny; discovering it is half the fun, and part of the frustration. This book was written to help you discover whether or not your calling is in sales. People say things like "you ought to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a teacher." But how do you know? The answer is, you don't. The same goes for sales, I would argue, four-fold. Sales is "not" the profession of choice. Parents do not welcome their children into the world declaring, "Ah, this one is going to be a salesperson." To my thinking, becoming a salesperson is more like waking up one day and discovering that mighty rock sitting in front of you. "What is this ugly thing?" you ask yourself. "Who brought this into my life?" The answer is-you did-you just don't know it at the time.

At first the rock of sales may feel like a yoke around your neck. You may even try to run away from it. I did. There will be times you doubt the rock was meant for you. You may even plead with it to leave you alone. But the rock will stay in your head if selling is your destiny. All you will hear are the reflections of your pleas coming from that rock of sales. If your calling is sales, the urge will never leave you. It will always be there, lurking in the far corners of your mind, until, one day (if you are like me), you will submit to it and say, "OK, I am going to break this open and see what treasures lie within." But long before you discover what rests deep inside, you must first push that rock through valleys and up hills, training yourself for a life in the profession. Can I be a successful salesperson? Can I become a millionaire? Do I really have a desire for sales? Will I know the signs for success when I see them? These are the questions that sales people ask themselves every day. If you want to know the answers then read on. I will teach through story and example how to sell, not through rules by rote, but through "living example." I will explain how I made a million dollars not by some unproven formula, or new fangled closing technique, but rather through perseverance and hard work (and I came so close to failing it will make the hairs on your neck stand up). I will share with you the good stories, and the bad ones. I will instruct you on how to avoid the typical "sales pitfalls" many of us fall into; Lord only knows how many I have fallen into over the years. But teach you in the traditional way I will not do. There will not be a test at the end of this book to find out if you memorized your closing lines correctly. This is a sales book of a different color. This book is all about getting your head in the game and keeping it there, regardless of what comes your way. As my friend Tim from Chicago puts it, "It's all about the mental game. Keeping your head in it is 90% of the battle." Amen, brother, Amen.

Anyone who wants to be successful in sales can be: but can is the operative word. You cannot be successful in sales through passive participation in the basics. You cannot expect to make a million dollars without having discovered your inner selling soul. And you cannot go into sales part-time. It has to become your full-time passion, you non-stop job. And when, and if, you embrace this great profession called sales, get ready to enjoy the hard earned fruits of your labor. Anyone who wants to be successful in sales and is willing to work hard to get there can be successful-regardless of education, race, creed, size, or statue in society. This book is all about taking you as far as you want to go. This book is about helping you discover the passion within you that will make you great.

Carpe Diem.