Selling in Arkansas
Letter to Rob, Nov. 3, 2005
When I was selling cookware in Arkansas one Christmas break during college I hit a streak of success. For about four days in a row almost every girl I called on bought a set. Ordinarily it was hard to sell even one set a day, and I sold about five sets a day for four or five days straight—around 22 sets—and I headed back to Missouri early, leaving the rest of the sales team behind.
What was especially interesting was that after the first half dozen sales I almost didn't care if I wrote another contract or not. I could quit any time and still have a good pile of cash. I could not just enjoy the experience. The fun of giving my cookware show for girls and their moms.
Not only would they buy, they would me up with referrals. So in addition to not caring about the outcome, I was tired and a little giddy from the back-to-back appointments.
All those factors of demeanor produced in me a powerful sales technique: enjoy the process, don’t care about the outcome. It caused the customers to like and trust me. It became their role more than mine to close the deal. My role? To share my enthusiasm for this great set of pans I owned. The girls had to sort of break in and ask if they could have a set of it, too.
At one point I made two appointments at almost the same time. I rushed into the first demonstration at high speed, but even then had to stop it halfway through. But the girl and her mother insisted on signing a contract, and I had to do paperwork at the same time I was packing my wares back up. Then I rushed to the next appointment and made another sale.
One afternoon I left a window down in my car and a little rain got in, dampening my pile of contracts. That evening at the motel I had to dry them out. I did it by spreading them out on my bed. The mattress was a double, but still not large enough. I asked my traveling partner, Reggie, if I could use his mattress, too.
Reggie was a big, high-spirited Bible College student with a wife and a baby. Hadn’t made a single sale on this trip. He was sitting in one of the chairs trying to eat and watch TV and kept glancing over at me—moving my contracts tighter and tighter together to fit another one in. You could see the coming indigestion in his face.