“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Jim Barnet

Preface: Jim Barnet and I met through LinkedIn. It’s, perhaps, one of those “unusual” LinkedIn relationships. When Jim reached out to connect, he didn’t start prospecting me. In fact he never has. But we leverage our LI relationship to share ideas, explore issues we each see happening in the markets. These are fascinating conversations, I learn so much from them.

In reading Jim’s story, there are a few things that strike me. We tend to think of sellers as “individual contributors. But, today’s reality is selling is something we do with others, collaboratively. Certainly, it’s collaborative conversations with our customers. But we also rely on others, our managers, our teammates, others in the organization, partners. But selling is not something we do by ourselves.

A quote stands out, it’s similar to what we’ve seen in the other stories: “What I love most, is helping my customers solve tough business problems and in doing so advance their careers and their company’s success.”

Why I’m so interested in selling, Jim Barnet

When I exited community college with my Business Administration and Marketing diplomas, I was sure I was destined for a glorious career in the glamorous field of Marketing.  My original vision was a like a Neapolitan ice cream mixture of Dilbert’s marketing department, with everyone wearing toga’s and drinking martini’s like in Mad Men.

After several months of snobby interview rebuffs and rejection letters I ended up taking a job selling retail jewelry to make ends meet.  I thought it was just going to be for a few months until I caught my dream marketing job break.

Fast forward twenty years of professional selling (mostly in technology) and I can’t imagine a profession I would ever find more fulfilling, more challenging, or more interesting.

What I love most, is helping my customers solve tough business problems and in doing so advance their careers and their company’s success. I ask my customers “what would we have to do together to result in a cake with their name on it and a crowd in the lunch room chanting their name?”  By helping customers solve those tough business problems, you really can make a difference.

I also love working with a really great team.  Sales is one of the most accountable professions on the planet, you get all the credit and all the blame, but very few really successful salespeople do it without very strong marketing, pre-sales, implementation and support teams collaborating with them and backing them up.

I really love learning new things.  Sales is absolutely one of the professions where you could spend your life devoted to learning and never run out of new things to learn.  Industry expertise, technical expertise, line of business expertise, sales expertise.  I love getting measured and getting better, and there is always something new to master with a career in professional selling.

Professional selling in its most pure form is simply mastering how to genuinely understand a customer’s current state and objectives and then describe a potential solution in a compelling, succinct and easy to understand way, in order to help them solve a tough problem, or achieve an important unattained goal.

I am always genuinely surprised and very humbled when I run into customers at a trade show or conference that I haven’t talked to in years and they remember me.  They remember me because I helped them achieve something important to them.  And I can’t think of any better way I’d like to be remembered.