Ducks and Mistakes

Something I learned this week is that it’s one thing to listen to Professor Sweet talk about sales in class, and it is another thing to actually try selling yourself. When we were told to go sell rubber ducks around campus, I did not think it was going to be all that hard. I mean the ducks are only $2-3 and I figured it would be easy to get people to drop such a small amount of money for such a good cause. But it was not nearly as easy as I thought it would be and forced me to think about the ways that I need to change my approach to a sales conversation.

In all honesty, I think I probably came off exactly like one of the salesman that we all said we’ve had bad experiences with at the beginning of the semester. The competition aspect of selling the ducks, combined with the time constraint, definitely made me less likely to use the good selling techniques that we’ve spent so much time on in class, and instead basically just ask straight up if they wanted a duck and move on quickly if they said no. That was one of the takeaways I got from that competition; you can’t rush a sales conversation. It’s important to take the time to listen to what the customer sees as a concern and provide some clarity that will hopefully lead them to a decision to buy. While there could be the opposite of this where you spend all of your time in a conversation with one customer and miss other opportunities, I still think I could have probably made more sales if I had relaxed a little bit and let the customers.

Another thing that I think this exercise helped me realize is how hard it is to not view rejection as failure. When reading the information in Mattson, it’s easy to think that it would be very easy to separate you personally from the sales you. But when I would try to get someone to buy a duck and they would say no, especially after spending some time to try and convince them to buy, that definitely felt like failure. But it was a good experience to get used to being told no and not being afraid of that.

Finally, this exercise really taught me a hard lesson about assumptions. In the way that my teammates and I were selling the ducks, we would mention that the money was going to help cancer victims. But one of the people we talked to lost someone very close to him last summer to cancer, and using that as a reason why he should buy just felt wrong. But we had assumed and had not even thought about the fact that the people we talked to could have struggled personally with what we were trying to raise money for.

So the main takeaways were not to rush, not to view rejection as failure, and not to make assumptions, all lessons which we’ve learned in class but I needed to experience and make mistakes with before I could truly understand how important these things are.