Fish are Born to Fly

I grew up around salesmen; excuse me, “account executives,” or “customer relationship managers” as they are now called.

My dad was a salesman.

It took me a long time to figure that out, because every time I asked him what he did, he would give me a different ambiguous answer. At one point, he told me he was a fireman. I knew this wasn't true, but it did explain his preference for black and white dogs.

My dad was not a person who dealt in metaphors, but his choice of fireman, was, as it turns out, a pretty accurate one. Like firemen, sales people face risk every day. They know winning and losing like few others and, try as they might, they live and die by forces that are beyond their control.

My dad's professional life spanned a period in history when selling transformed the world and was, in turn, transformed by it. Sales created opportunities, fueled business, created jobs and moved people up the socio-economic ladder. Salesmen are also the ventriloquist puppets spouting the magic words dreamt up by the dark lords in advertising.

When times are good, it's because salesmen are there to stoke the fires of good fortune and, when they're not, it's because some salesman took all your money in exchange for a bag of smoke.

That's a lot of pressure.

My dad would bring his friends home after work and they would drink and unwind. Our home was a kind of half-way house, a decompression chamber where they could purge the bad gasses from their blood before they made the final push to the surface.

It's ironic that nitrogen should be a common problem for both deep sea divers and salesmen. In one instance it's a by-product of their work environment and, in the other, a poison in the air they breathe.

My dad's friends were loud and funny guys. These were guys who liked nothing more than to make fun of one another, but who knew they were like the floats in a toilet tank: the first to reach top when the water was going up and with only a slender lifeline to keep them from going down the drain when it was flowing the other way.

The ephemeral nature of their work made each success and every failure keenly felt.

There were days when we children would be paraded out into the street to see somebody's new car, or motor-scooter, or when all the wives would get some elaborate kitchen appliance; and there were others when money was scarce and ends did not meet.

My dad came from a time when you did not talk about money. That he chose to sell investments must have made a difficult job even harder.

I don't have a clear picture of this, but, based on my own responses to money, I believe my dad was very generous with his friends and loaned money as much to help as to change the conversation to anything else.

I only recently learned that my brother and I share the same abhorrence of the splitting the bill negotiation. We will pick up the whole thing just so we can talk about something else.

What helped my father in his work was his curiosity. He seemed genuinely interested in people.

I had the good fortune to travel with him several times and he always made it a point to sit at the bar because, as he said, that was where the action was. One of his favorite stories was of the time he met the man who claimed to be the biggest pornographer in London.

My dad had accounts because he made friends. He made friends because he was always ready to help.

As I got older, I began to understand that my dad's willingness to help was not always reciprocated, that the people he loaned money to didn't always pay it back, that “friends” didn't always watch out for one another.

As I got older, I understood that my dad was not a saint, he was a salesman.

I've heard it said that every generation is a reaction to the one that came before. Liberal parents begat conservative children; religious parents have atheist kids.

What does that mean for kids of salesmen?

This is a question I have been wrestling with for my whole life.

The question becomes particularly relevant as I again find myself at something of a career crossroads.

I have been posting my resume to countless job search and staffing websites, hoping to win the lottery and come up with the magical combination of words and phrases that will help me get through to a round where people and machines make the final decisions.

But if I do, if I can get in the room with another person, can I sell myself as being the right person to solve their problem?

I am not a salesman.

If I were, I would still have a job.

Despite what you may have read, being a salesman, like being a good waiter, is an art and not a “safety” job to take while waiting for your “real” career to start.

Selling is also not a con.

Persuading an Eskimo to buy an ice maker is not the same as selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower for scrap. It's about identifying a need for which the ice maker is the only viable solution.

Looking for work, on the other hand, is a confidence game. Persuading an employer to invest today on the promise of future value requires a degree of confidence that is often hard to come by, especially if the job search was not planned.

To be looking for work is to be confronted with all the bad choices you made while you were working.

Once you go online to look for work, it seems the only email you ever get is from people all-too-ready to tell you what you should have done to prepare yourself for a position you never expected to find yourself in.

I can't speak for anybody else, but I was too busy working to become involved in trade associations, or programming committees, or lunchtime service clubs.

I am not positioning myself for sainthood, but I often worked through my lunch in order to meet deadlines and going to hear the weekly speaker over an anonymous chicken dish did not seem a good use of my spare time. Nobody made it clear to me that, while work may be done between eight and five, business got done and careers were made at lunch and after hours.

You would think I would know better, especially given my background as bartender to my dad's friends, but all I saw was the medicinal alcoholism and not the good business sense and career moves being made.

Now don't get me wrong, I am also not making a late-in-the-game play for a Shriner's fez, a Mason's apron, or a salesman's liver, I am just too-late recognizing the truth that we are all salesmen, or more accurately, we all need to be salesmen.

Arthur Miller's “Death of a Salesman” is a post-war allegory for America as salesman, as Willy Loman. Depending on when you ask me, you will get a different answer on how closely I identify with the role of the play's lead character, Willy Loman. Today, in the middle of another work day, as I sit in a coffee house filling out another career profile for a job that doesn't interest me, I can identify very closely.

I have never been a persuasive advocate for my “product.” I just do the work to the best of my ability. I never talked much about the work I did because anybody I might tell was either working with me, or completely disinterested.

So, I don't have the pitch and the promotional materials, to help make a good impression with the client. And every resume I write and cover letter I draft, feels like the embroidery on one of those pillows that you get at a roadside tourist attraction: attractive enough to draw your attention from across the store, but quickly unravels once you get too close.

Put me in a room with a decision-maker and I will sell myself short every time. Take me out of my work environment and ask me why I should be hired over anyone else and I will actually ask myself the question, “Well, who else are you looking at?”

By this absence of self-promotion skills, I can recognize the valuable lessons that salesmen can teach you. I am perfectly comfortable telling others that there is a life lesson in the A-B-C monlogue from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another play about salesmen: “A-always, B-be, C-closing.”  Life is largely a transactional process:  you give to get: sometimes it's immediate and sometimes not, but always asking for the sale, for what you want is never bad advice.

Asking for the next job, even when you have one, would seem, especially from my current perspective, very good advice.

I've told people to do this, but I can't seem to do it myself, which makes it all the more troublesome that the only contacts I have had in response to my resume postings have been from companies looking for salesmen.

How can I sell insurance when I failed to insure myself against risks like losing a job? How can I seize the opportunity of “unlimited upside earning potential” when I have repeatedly failed to take advantage of the opportunity to learn from earlier mistakes?

In the end, instead of soaring with the eagles, I guess I am more of a birdwatcher: I can recognize the difference between a Cardinal and a Scarlet Tanager, but I will never be either one.