What attending a political activism training taught me about sales

Tabling. Social obligations. Organization funding. Due to a combination of some set of things, we often throw ourselves into situations we were not prepared for. What goes wrong after that is, primarily, not knowing how to do what you promised to do, and secondly it all goes wrong further when you open your mouth to talk to someone when your in that situation.

For some sets of circumstances, and from some sets of factors causing your dilemma, you may end up running a bake sale fundraiser for some such group who has tasked you with convincing strangers to come to you, become interested in pies they cannot see in front of them as they are soon to be made by college students, and convince them to pay $15 pre-ordering one of these abstract pies to fund that very group of students. And sometimes, the person with that task is me.

As some of you may have noticed, I am currently within a few days of the middle of a sales class as I write about this, in fact the only sales class for my (and most likely your) major. And observant as you are, the above description clearly includes details one would only think of if that experience has occurred for me, and did so in the past tense. Our great minds are thinking alike, and so I will risk using as few words as possible, for your time, to tell you what information helped me ensure as many aforementioned people cheated their on diets as possible.

God does not throw you before selling opportunities only once you have been trained in selling. He makes you make do, and I did this with two courses from a political activism training program, the innovative person that I am.

“What selling techniques, skills or anything, would be in a political activism program” your great mind is thinking. And, after that, “Isn’t politics full of nothing but immoral people and lying?” Well, being as you have heard with me in our class the perception of sales people, and I am keeping my word, the next of many paragraphs will use as few words as I can to put many thoughts into your head.

Lobbyists.

To be concise, training #1 was convincing random people to join with you in grassroots action, and #2 on doing the same convincing but on local politicians. Don’t ask me why I did this in my free time, or what other randomness occurs in my free time. But this training all boiled down to selling.

To best explain how this is, I will use the very information taught in the course from beginning to end, and thus start with Praxeology.

Praxeology – Human action

If this word vaguely feels familiar, or stressful, that is because it was the subject of Micro Econ day one. Being the study of human action, it consists of the idea that humans act by feeling uncomfortable in some way, envisioning a comfortable situation, and seeing some action as the means of moving from the former to the later. This training broke it down further, detailing feeling uncomfortable about the status quo, about the status quo getting worse if left alone, about the status quo simply not being the best possible situation, etc. We practiced using this to be able to, get this, convince random people that we offered a solution to the pain of theirs in exchange for them giving us some hours of their week in volunteering. We learned to focus on their pain, and some fellow students of mine practiced this in cold calling for the group running this training. Following this was:

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Your spidey senses are indeed tickling again, for this was in Principles of Marketing (at least with my professor, that most all of you seem to have not had.) To be quick the idea is that all human needs are ordered from survival to emotional to “self-actualization”. A person with an unmet need generally won’t focus on the needs higher in the hierarchy, a problem for us trainees to learn to solve to put people in self-actualization, so they are most easily persuaded to “spend” some action to address a problem they feel. As this group training us intended to support grassroots political movements we were trained on finding out where the people around us were on that hierarchy, by finding their unmet needs through everyday conversation and knowing them as a community member, and providing some need like food at events or pop-ups at outdoor tables NO MATTER THE WEATHER to have the need of shelter met while you are talking to them, etc.

The training included other information, on the other side of the overlap of politics and sales, while the second training included this one subject of getting to know local politicians to talk to them about their votes.

Get to know your client/politician

You can throw numbers at people as many times as you have numbers. You can tell someone there is a problem they ought to think about. But what a local politician will think about is, on the eve of a vote, the opposition has gotten seven people to yell numbers over the phone to his office while you got to know your local officials. This bill would, through government interference, increase the medical costs of many people your local official knows and is friends with, including the nice 88 year old lady at his church. He makes his way to the county legislature the day of the vote, already forgetting the pre-scripted yelling his office received as usual over the phone, when his cell gets a call. Mrs. Earnest from church wishes him a wonderful Monday morning, and he asks why she has called him so soon in the week. She has heard about this bill requiring new smart lights in the local hospitals, including hers about 5 blocks from her home. She knows all about how that hospital works, being a repeating patient, and she has read the proposed bill. Smart lights would increase Electromagnetic Radiation in the hospitals, and this bill would increase expenditure and therefore procedure prices of the hospital for no benefit other than convincing voters that those who passed it did nice sounding things for them and should get re-elected. An effect this bill would actually have is to risk her retirement savings just barley not being enough to cover herself anymore, and her health being jeopardized even if she could afford it. They talk, wish each other a wonderful week, will see each other Sunday unless they bump into each other at the County Market again and the bill loses by one vote.

As a proper Grover, my conclusion statement is that the sales world and THE world can often include making lemonade out of lemons, and politics is the art of lemons.