Persistence

 

Jolyon Wagg - A frequently encountered side-character in the Tintin Series by Herge

Of all the professions in the world, the enthusiasm of a salesperson (probably) needs to be the most indefatigable and deep rooted. Not being fully invested in her work is not an option she has. Whatever be the product or service and its relevance to the customer, her only job is to push the sale to an often less-than-interested client. No wonder the salesperson is a favoured character in comedies, dramas and tragedies alike. We have all encountered a character like Tintin's Jolyon Wagg in our daily lives and our irritation with them is tempered with the fact that they have been given a tough job to do.

While all of us have some part of our professional lives that we struggle through, it is eased by a formal separation from the selection/rejection whatever it is that we have been giving at least 8 hours a day towards. We mostly work on a small part of a larger impersonal project and rejection, while worry-inducing, is not borne alone. The salesperson on the other hand is handed a product or service that she hasn't designed or built, convinces herself of its distinction from all other similar products and pitches the same to strangers whose interests and motivations may be universes apart from even the best features of Product X. 

I understand that sometimes the product sells itself and sometimes even the customer has an active interest. I remember the time when a door-to-door salesperson brought little plastic lights, blue and white and shaped like spaceships (as per an industrial designer and an imaginative child), that could be tapped on for a warm friendly night light. My mom and me were equally enamoured and at the price at which she was selling them, the sale was a foregone conclusion. Those lights remained at use in home long after I had ceased to qualify as a child.

In some respects, I suppose that sales can also be viewed from the frame of just another job where strategy and selection yield 'results' with the right 'execution'. But the biggest challenge in my (ignorant, inexperienced and unsolicited) opinion would be in how to make the rejection not feel personal. When you have approached someone with all your charm and conviction only to be told "Not interested", sometimes repeatedly, how do you keep the fire going?

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