Working in Sales

Besides working at Chick-fil-A for over four years and running my own photo/video business, I also had a job in a sales company, but I tend to leave this job off of my resume. I was originally drawn into this company via a friend, went for an interview, and got the job. I will be honest, I probably jumped on this opportunity wayyy too quickly since I hadn’t done any prior research and was instead fixated on the benefits of the job. As I received training over the course of one week, I started to question the honesty of this company as there were a few practices I was uncomfortable being associated with.

The company I worked for, often called a “multilevel marketing company” was responsible for selling very expensive and high-quality products made by another company to customers via cold calls and meetings with sellers from the middleman company. After the training, which was 15 hours over the course of one week and had about 25 other people, and doing some sales, I began to feel uncertain about working for the company. We were given a “script”, which was a book that was perfectly formulated and crafted to provide sellers the highest success rate of purchases from customers. I realized that if this company could create such a book, they would also have the best formula for recruiting new people/encouraging them to make more sales/making you feel good about what you were doing. I even noticed some of these practices happening in the office the branch I worked at was at. The main thing that stuck out to me the most was, towards the end of the training, we were asked to download an app that allowed us to submit contact info from our contacts so the company could contact them and recruit them for the job. As this happened, other employees started to hype us up and encourage us with recruiting as many people as possible, with promises of giving us free products based on the number of contacts we gave them. All of the people in the training felt this encouragement and the promise of free products and submitted as many of their contacts as possible. At that point, I realized that the text message I had received, which had appeared as though a friend of mine truly thought this marketing company would be a good job for me, was more likely my friend going through the same experience I had just gone through and was a simple copy and pasted message.

To conclude, my short two months at that job gave me some of the most important and valuable job skills/sales knowledge than any of my other jobs. I have in my possession a book that perfectly caters to a customer by expressing and displaying a need that the customer originally would not have considered having prior to meeting with a seller. While it wasn’t necessarily a BAD job, it was one that I was not comfortable being associated with.