I was a weird kid. When I was fourteen, I remember talking to my dad about the idea of becoming a salesman (how many kids do you hear saying they want to be a salesman)? I remember thinking it sounded like a fun job; after all it involved two things that I liked – talking to people and making money; that is until my father told me about how often salesman are fired. That scared little me who has always been worried about job and income security. This idea of job security dissuaded me from honestly considering sales until we had our classes on Buoyancy. Talking about buoyancy – while it confirmed my concern for failure – it encouraged me that salesman will always have down times..but that they can and should learn from them.
Recently I had a conversation with my uncle, a sales engineer in Denver Colorado. I asked him about sales and job security and his answer was quite surprising and encouraging. He informed me that salesman almost never worry about job security…not because they don’t get fired, but because they know that they will get rehired. This fact made me reflect on our talk about buoyancy and showed me the truth of the idea that good salesman are very good an explaining and understanding their failure. If they weren’t, they would be spending a considerably larger amount of time on the streets.
So to the subject of this blog, why do good salesmen get fired? While I can’t give a perfect answer to this question, I do know two truths: the first is that all good salesman have bad years, and secondly, good salesmen are never at the same company long. The first point is related to the topic of buoyancy.
All salesman experience downturns, no matter how skilled. This fact is unavoidable. However, an expert salesman knows how to interpret this and what explanatory style to utilize to move past it, get another job, and climb the ladder once again.
The second reason. while unrelated to the topic at hand, is still interesting. It is that salesmen who are skilled at their job can often run out of leads, or exhaust their network to an extent that they reach a point of diminishing returns. Once this happens, although they are still bringing in money, their vertical ability begins to slow and the level at which they exceed their quota begins to shrink. This often prompts the salesman to quit, or to lose enough sales to be fired. This however, does not discourage the good salesman. The good salesman takes this as encouragement
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I really like how you opened this conversation. I think it is really inspiring that from such a young age you were interested in being a salesman and here you are in college in a sales class. What you said about your Uncle and his experiences seems to be true for the people in my life too, my Uncle is also a salesmen and he goes from job to job and loves it, never stressing about the next job or “getting fired”.
First, I find it interesting to hear the position name “sales engineer”. That is really interesting about job security for a salesman. I wonder if they are often in positions to sell things that they really do not believe in for a time.