salesmanship

There was a man who came to the office selling encyclopedias to us.
He approached every person in the office and delivered the same spiel over and over again.I had to wonder if he even knew what he was talking about.
Or if he even noticed that we were busy with lots of other things.
As we all excused ourselves from buying the three-volume crap, he would strike back with more reasons for us to take our wallets out.

Is salesmanship a skill learned in school, or is there a sales person in all of us?
If you think about it, we've done a lot of sales talks without us knowing it.
Three guys hoping to go home with one hot woman they met in a bar.
May the man with the best pick-up line win.
Two clerks vying for a promotion.
How do you convince the boss that you deserve the post?
Three pupils raising their hands to answer the teacher's question.
Kid one puts on a big smile. Kid two waves his hand frantically.
Kind three shouts out the answer without being called first.
Wife tries to win back womanizing husband by reinventing herself.

And me.
My brains bled from writing an essay to qualify to write for the school newspaper in high school.
I did a kickass interview to get into my course of choice in college.
I wrote a two-page profile of myself to impress my first boss.
I got all dolled up to get a guy I liked.
I beefed up on my resume-writing skills so I could get a good job.
I've done a million other things that required convincing, sometimes coercion.

What you are offering must be 100% beneficial, and relevant.
You can't sell a laptop to a farmer.
Well if you're really good you can, just like a woman can get a commitment-phobic to marry her.

Anyway . . .
This world won't tolerate bad salesmanship.
You have to market what you've got in order to get somewhere.
It's not necessarily a bad thing.
It depends on both the means and the end.
And nothing compares to the experience of closing a sale, especially a huge one.
It just makes you feel so good about yourself, that you've won someone over despite the tight competition.

But closing a sale is just the beginning.
The next thing you have to worry about is customer service.
But that's a WHOOOLE different story.