50 years of selling: the greatest profession.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: [on] MANAGEMENT - Viewpoint essay

My first sales job was in 1958, 52 years ago. I was educated as an engineer (a physicist really), and I thought that the title of "Sales Engineer" was cool.

I remember my first day selling industrial plastic. I was sent out with Bernie because Bernie knew everything about sales and sold more of our product than anyone else in the office. Bernie was great with his customers. They really liked him, they joked a lot; they would have been doing high-fives except they hadn't been invented yet. I joined right in with the fun and couldn't wait to get my own customers to continue with.

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After about a week with Bernie I was given my own book of prospects and sent out to meet these people who had not seen anyone from our company for some time.

Well, I really had a hard time of it. I got a lot of, "Whatever you're selling, kid, we don't need it!" It's hard to be friendly when all they want to do is get rid of you. I had gone to the company training school for six weeks and was ready to answer any question. Problem was, hardly anyone asked me a question, ever.

I tried hard to out-Bernie Bernie. But it wasn't working so well, and I wasn't selling much. Whatever it was, it wasn't working for me. At the end of the first year I concluded that selling was just not for me. So I quit and found another job as an engineer, designing circuits for the Atlas missile program. It was lots of fun. I even had a "secret" clearance for the designs I was doing.

The Atlas program ran out, and I ended up at a publishing company as an editor writing articles about technical stuff. My boss there said I should try sales, that I had the personality for it. I told him I had already failed at that, but he eventually convinced me to try again, and that's when I started to learn a lot of things that make sales the most fun job I could ever have imagined. It began to suit me perfectly, and it still does.

So here are, in my opinion, the sharpest tools of a good salesperson:

* Talk to people. Everyone has a story. How much of that story can I learn today? What's going on? Every person you walk past on your way to see Mr. Big is his possible...