High School Baseball Sponsorship

The biggest impact sales has had on me was when my high school baseball team was running a fundraiser for new equipment, so my job was to visit local businesses and get their sponsorship that would be displayed on the outfield wall. I visited my local Tex-Mex restaurant, local baseball training facility, and local mechanic to ask them for their sponsorship. The more I got to talking to these guys, the more it just became a natural conversation about how baseball is going, how school is going, where I’m going to college, just things like that. And this directly translates to class because of how natural sales is supposed to feel. It’s a conversation about needs and wants, and it’s not necessarily selling the product itself, but selling to the person. You want to be relatable to them, be flexible with questions, and generally just have an easy conversation. Luckily, when I was getting sponsors, I didn’t get any no’s, so I didn’t really have to be comfortable with hearing no just yet. I went after people that I’d known previously from church, the neighborhood, and elsewhere because it was easy to sell them on helping me out, and that I wouldn’t have to convince total strangers. But even still, I couldn’t walk in, slam the proposal down, and tell them to sign it, I knew I had to come off as someone who cares, which luckily I did, and these were nice people I was selling to. I think the biggest help I had was not having my parent there so it looked like I was forced to do this. At this point I could drive, so it looked like I made a significant effort myself to go down there, and keep up the relationship with each person I sold to, and learning about sales now, I can see how that was crucial in the sales process.