Sales

i've been working with salesmen for some time now, and hard-core salesmen, too, and it occurs to me that although i know their ways very well some of you may not. i am going to attempt to convey, therefore, how thuroghly despicable actions can be carried out by person who are not, in themselves, despicable.

do not be fooled. the smile in the eyes of the sales person is genuine, and so is his or her charm and ebullient hope to help you. the value of his or her offer, however, is most certainly trash if it requires someone as talented and aggressive as the person you are talking to to pitch it.

the first thing to understand is that sales people, or rather, people who are good at selling things, are much more charismatic than you or i and so are able to get away with much more. i think that this gives them a warped sense of consequenses and of truth. they are specialists at convincing others of things, and they also have a great facility for either not knowing the exact truth themselves or at least not being able to figure out what it is. icorrigible optimism is also a great sales tool, so these also tend to be the type of people who ignore bad indications at all cost, just like you fools who continuosly underestimate subway transit times.

this frees them from having to specifically lie most of the time. they don't know anything, and if anyone does know they can convince them that they are wrong, so their lack of knowledge gets spread as though it really were something, and then it starts to really seem true.

for example: my hypothetical company offers some crappy service. I'm the salesman/woman for my company. I just don't have it in me to really asses the service and determine it to be crappy. even if it is obviously more expensive than the superior product of a competitor, I will be likely to say to myself that everyone really would be better off buying from me because "I provice better customer service anyway" or "it will be more valuable for them to develop a relationship with my company in the long run". these are the kind of vague statements that i am certainly not going to have the patience or pessimistic knack to recognise as either boldfaced lies or pitifully empty hopes.

and its a good thing that i don't, because that would definitely hurt my chances of making a sale. the kind of people who are good at poking holes in company services and policies never make it as sales people. rubes can smell cynicism, see it in the eyes.

given this protectively un-cynical personality to provide a basis of deeply fuzzy morality, combined with the pressure and perception of victimization that comes from living on commision (living, "on a smile and a shoeshine" [death of a salesman]) your typical sales person is likely to be thorougly not-evil, and yet still engage in what someone else might label vicious deception in order to get people to give up their $. in companies that employ salespeople but are not run by them (most business owners are former salespeople--being able to convince people to give you money is a big advantage to have if you own a business), this tendancy is encouraged to the fullest extent possible in much the same way that normally friendly dogs are teased and starved so that they become vicious.