January 25, 2006

• SALES 101

  
  

   

  
  

  I’m leaving my office here in Tulsa in a few minutes to travel to our corporate office in Oklahoma City to spend the next three days attending our national sales meeting. We do these meetings twice a year and this will be the 24th sales meeting I’ve attended since I began working for my company. There is nothing they can say at this meeting that I haven’t heard a dozen or more times. I’m falling asleep just typing about it.

  
  

   

  
  

  Some firms have their sales meetings in fun locations like Hawaii, Las Vegas, New York, or even Toledo, but do we go somewhere fun?  Nooooooo…we are stuck in Oklahoma City, known by most of us here in the Sooner State as the armpit of Oklahoma (I know, most of you who live elsewhere assume the entire state is a giant armpit. It is, but the Oklahoma City area is much hairier and it never uses deodorant).

  
  

   

  
  

  While our company is quite large for our industry, by comparison to other types of firms, we are tiny. There are only about 30 of us in the sales force around the country, but that is still too many salespeople to put in the same building. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a room with 30 salesmen, but it can only be described as a “clash of the enormous egos.”

  
  

   

  
  

  Later this evening, we will all gather in the bar of the hotel where we are staying and everyone will play “I can top that” with stories of the giant accounts they are just on the verge of winning. We might as well all be taking our dicks out and measuring them (my sincere appology to the two female salespersons on our staff that don’t have dicks).

  
  

   

  
  

  Even though I’m the longest tenured salesperson in the company, I’ve always kind of been the red-headed stepchild of the sales division.  As many of you know, before I went to work in the “secular world” for this company, I was in the ministry. Our Vice President here in Tulsa went out on a limb and hired me as a salesperson 12 years ago even though I had no sales experience. I argued that being in the ministry is 90% sales (a view I still hold) but I don’t think our company president ever bought that, and I’ve always been viewed with just a bit of suspicion.

  
  

   

  
  

  Thursday evening is the sales awards banquet which is a giant orgy of self-congratulations. However, they pass out lots of money, so I don’t mind so much. I will admit to being proud of something: I will receive the “President’s Award” this year for surpassing a specific dollar amount in sales for five consecutive years. I’m only the second salesperson in the 34 year history of the company to receive it, so I’m understandably proud of that. I’m pretty sure though, that when our company president hands it over he will make some comment about how I shouldn’t preach a sermon as my acceptance speech, so I plan to do at least 45 minutes on the parable of the lost coins.

  
  

   

  
  

  I probably won’t get to post again until next week because management frowns on people surfing the web on their laptops while the engineering department takes two hours to explain this years’ revisions to the “request for engineering” form (which reverts it back to being identical to the request for engineering form they had in 1994) but I hope to keep up with everyone’s updates during the breaks.

  
  

   

  
  

  Wish me luck and the ability to stay conscious for the next three days.  

  
  

   

  
  

  EDIT: I’m on break…and I’m DYING!

  • 12:21 pm
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