My Background

My mom claims I’ve been selling my entire life. There’s some truth in that statement. Since I can remember, I was always selling something. I sold yard service, snow and leaf removal, gutter cleaning, Christmas wreathes and newspaper subscriptions to my neighbors. I was the first kid on my block to sell my beer can collection and my baseball cards.(1) I was always organizing yard and garage sales.(2) In college, I majored in sales. That's your major when you have horrible grades or you don't learn a marketable skill.

I started my professional career selling insurance, with the determination to get out of sales. I sold insurance for eight years, until I got a job selling for the phone company. During the first fifteen years of my professional life I sold over the phone. I don't have a good speaking voice, it lacks inflection, and many times I’ve been asked if I was tired or down. I've also managed to create my own accent. I grew up in Philadelphia, but people there asked me if I was from Boston. Go figure.
For the next eight years I sold outside. No, I didn’t sell grass, trees and the sky. I prospected, went on sales calls and appointments.

For the past 23 years I've engaged in every possible form of selling. I've sold inside and outside, residential and commercial, tangible and intangible, short and long sales cycles, products and services, I've worked on the direct and agent side, I've been full commission and salaried, I've sold big and small ticket items..you name it I've sold it. I've sold insurance, every imaginable telephone service (I sold the first versions of "high speed" internet service. Just imagine paying over a hundred bucks a month for "high speed" internet and then experiencing your internet moving slightly faster than dial up.), I sold roofs, commercial landscape maintenance, phone systems, cable TV, sporting goods and men's wear. I've executed every possible sales activity. I've cold called, prospected, networked, speed networked, presented, partnered, consulted, bribed, paid off, solicited, marketed, pleaded, begged, prostituted myself, seduced, failed to tell the truth, told the truth even when it jeopardized a sale. I managed inside and outside, salaried and full commissioned sales people.

No one in my family was a sales person (I have five sisters). My first wife thought sales was something you did when you couldn't do anything else and never considered commissions or bonuses to be money you could count on. My second wife worked in research and was mortified that our sales results were posted for everyone to see. (Luckily, I was first that month.)

If you read this blog on a regular basis, if you're in sales, you'll get the feeling that you're not alone and might pick an idea or two. If you're not in sales, maybe you'll get a better understanding of what a sales person goes through and you'll be nicer to sales people in the future.

1. I was a little crafty in my younger years. I had over 10,000 baseball cards. I went through them all and removed the best of the best. Then I put the best remaining cards at the beginning of each row of cards. I ran an ad in the classifieds. The first guy that came to see my cards bought them. He must have thought it was the greatest score ever because the few cards he looked at were all allstars and hall of famers. Meanwhile, if he went up a row a few inches, he would have seen half a dozen Milt Pappas’ cards.

2. Keep in mind, these were clearing house events where merchandise was sold for pennies on the dollar. Getting your dad to pay full price for a baseball mitt and then selling it later for a quarter of its value does not show proof of sales prowess.