I know it’s only Thanksgiving break -a short but sweet week off from class for rambunctious college students- but this means one thing: it’s time to start game-planning how to properly spend the precious minutes of the soon-to-come winter break. For aspiring entrepreneurs, I’ve got your answer:
Get the most random, weird, quirky, awkward sales job you can find. Here’s a personal testimony of why this is crucial:
Just before winter break of my senior year, Kasey, Nick, Jessica and I were about a month into founding Packback. With an astounding $4,500 in the bank, and a few pats on the back from our ISU professors, we were ready to take on the $8.2 billion textbook publishing industry. One problem- none of us had any legitimate sales experience. I say legitimate because “sales skills” are in fact built throughout life–any kid who’s ever procrastinated through a semester and then fiercely negotiated a borderline grade with the teacher has some sales experience. But I had never sold a product in exchange for cash. Then I saw the writing on the wall, literally. “Winter Break Work! $20 base pay!!” said the shiny posters plastered throughout the hallway. I was a mouse running low on cheese, so I trotted right into the trap.
Any college student reading this probably knows what I’m getting at- it was an advertisement for the infamous Vector Marketing, or as better known on the streets: Cutco Knives. Unbeknownst to me that virtually every living soul who expresses interest in the position gets hired, I signed up for an initial phone interview- nailed it! Put on a sport coat and tie for an in-person second interview- nailed it! Immediately thereafter, I got put in a shabby room to start cold calling the parents of my siblings’ friends out of the grade school phone book my new manager asked me to bring for an “exercise”. Ehh ok now this is getting weird, I thought to myself.
And it was, in fact, weird. There was nothing circumstantially normal about it. My friends weren’t hauling a leather pouch around, filled with serious weaponry, and demonstrating to the nice old lady down the street how the revolutionary ridged edges of my high-carbon stainless steel “Super Shears” (these ain’t your grandmother’s scissors, …or at least not yet) can slice straight through this shiny penny upon a mere squeeze of these highly engineered thermo-resin handles. Nope, my friends merely chuckled as they logged back into Call of Duty Online.
It was awkward. I can remember walking up to my first appointment, inside the home of a family I barely knew but had built up the courage to cold call out of that same grade school phone book. After debating whether to ditch this crazy operation entirely, it turned out to be a hell of an experience. My mother used to teach me that you shouldn’t disturb someone by calling their home telephone line after 7:00 P.M. Well, it was 8:30 P.M. on a winter’s night and I was walking smack dab into the family kitchen to sell some product. After stumbling my way through a horrendous presentation I miraculously survived with an order for “Super Shears”. $99 dollar sale! Nailed it!! Was it a sympathy order? Perhaps, but I can still feel the adrenaline as I stuffed my demo kit back into the leather pouch and strolled out the door with order documents in hand.
The simple truth is that I didn’t know what in the world I was doing. In addition to forgetting half my lines, the demonstration went about as smooth as a dull stainless steel blade struggling it’s way through a Thanksgiving turkey (inside knife industry joke). However, like a fresh whetstone rubbed against a rugged straight edge, my pitch game became smoother as I racked up appointments. Pretty soon, after I’d run out of younger siblings’ friends’ parents to call, I was rescuing my own friends’ parents from the “dull knife epidemic” running rampant through town. By the end of break I was at the top of the board for sales in the past month, and my confidence was only growing stronger.
To be clear, I’m in no way affiliated with Cutco, and in fact find the methods of upper management to be quite bizarre in many ways. However, the experience was priceless as it gave me a simple vehicle to start practicing the skill of demonstrating value in a product. That’s crucial for anyone looking to build a company, no matter how technically savvy they may be. The point is, find something to sell. It can be vacuums, knives, ski trips, whatever. Door to door and cold calling experience is where you earn your stripes.
I went back to school with the Packback team and we all embarked on another awkward job: calling up a few billion dollar publishing companies in attempts to get them on board with a revolutionary new way of conducting business. Within a few months we were sitting face to face with the President of one of the largest textbook publishing companies in the world, planting the seeds for an eventual partnership. You bet it was nice to have had some practice conveying value under pressure. So bring yourself as far away from the comfort zone as possible, and go get some sales experience. That crazy idea you’ve been daydreaming about in class all semester may very well depend on it!
WARNING: By no means would it be wise to scam anybody, so don’t sign up to sell something that you know is garbage. In hindsight I may find the Cutco management style questionable but those knives are indeed laser sharp, protected with a lifetime warranty, and all of my past customers remain satisfied to this day. Don’t burn your bridges by selling crap!!