Preface: “Yo dudes and dudettes…..,” in reading this I learned something new about Spence Wixom. I learned he is a surfer and that he was hitting the waves just about 30 miles north of where I was trying to hit the waves…. Wish I had known back then, we could have had some great conversations waiting for the right wave.
More seriously, Spence is one of a small number of people I include in my “kitchen table board of directors.” He and I share ideas about the state of selling and how we can drive improvement. His story, is similar to many of the other stories I’ve published. He talks about how he wanders between different roles and experiences, sometimes avoiding selling, but always finding his way back to selling.
There’s so much in this story, I’ll let you read, but one sentence seems to capture so much of Spence’s and others’ stories: “It just happened because I was curious about people and wanted to help them. I like ideas. I showed up, I wanted to help, and good things happened.”
Why I’m Interested in Selling:
An MBA finance professor of mine stood on the first day of class and said, “for any taking finance courses as a way to avoid selling I have news for you, every job is a sales job – get used to it.” He was right. I was one of those students. I’d been in sales. I went back for an MBA to get away from sales. It was an effort to convince myself I could be good at something else – something more cerebral, technical, elite (as I saw it). But I never found it, so I stayed doing what I’d been doing. It’s been the best thing in the world for me.
It’s been a career of wins and losses, opportunities captured and missed. But over time it’s built in me a passion for this profession. I must admit of my successes, they didn’t happen because of my genius. I didn’t intentionally design them. It just happened because I was curious about people and wanted to help them. I like ideas. I showed up, I wanted to help, and good things happened. I’m reminded of a few stories from early in my career that set this tone.
I moved to Southern California right out of college, owning next to nothing and knowing even less. It was Spring of 2001. The dot com meltdown was a few months old. My offer with Accenture in San Francisco vanished so I took a flyer on an analyst job at a boutique investment bank just outside of Newport Beach. I was selling smaller machine shops / mechanical contractors / specialty construction companies to larger machine shops / mechanical contractors / specialty construction companies.
I moved in with roommates at a house on 6th Street in Huntington Beach, a few blocks from the pier. Surfing became the focus of my life from the moment I moved in. How do I get the board? How do I get in the surf? A job was just a means to that end.
I started as a valuation analyst – building cash flow models, comps, arguing discount rates, trying to figure out what our client’s businesses were worth so we could take them to market. It was selling by numbers. Interesting work, but not something I felt compelled to do, especially if the surf was good.
Then a spot opened on the market research team. I grabbed it. My job for each client was to write a brief about their business that presented its market opportunity to investors. This piqued my curiosity. I was selling the sizzle, not the steak.
I also started working under the president of the firm. She was an ex-circuit court judge and the heiress to a shampoo fortune. She was also a notoriously tough boss and brutally critical of what she saw as shoddy work. She personally reviewed all research briefs for deals over $10 million. Nobody raised their hands for these deals. We knew what that meant – long hours researching, writing, re-writing, trying to sell her on the quality of the brief.
I remember thinking about a story I’d heard in Sunday school as a kid. An old man offers to pay the boy mowing his lawn based on the quality of the work, rated 1-10. He warns the boy in advance, “no one gets a 10”. The first week the boy does what he thinks is a decent job and gets a 3. The next week he tries much harder, at least as hard as he’s tried before, and gets a 6. This makes him mad. The next week, he shows up at six in the morning, cuts the grass three ways, smooths it out with a roller, edges and trims to perfection, and sweeps every blade of cut grass away. At just after 9 pm, the old man pays him for a 10.
I decided to raise my had for big projects. I was going for a 10. I said no to surfing sessions and worked late most nights, studied the red ink on edited briefs looking for ways to make it disappear on the next draft. I added research innovations to our briefs. I called industry experts and interviewed them. I worked and worked and worked at it. Eventually I won the president and our clients over. A VP, working under the president, called me to his office after I’d submitted a brief for client review. It was for a company that made small submersibles for the Navy. “What was in that brief?” he asked. “I don’t know.” I said, assuming I’d done something wrong. “The client just called; he said it was the best document he’s ever read.”
Buying a surfboard is a great feeling, catching a line on a wave is an even better feeling. But creating a perfect 10 experience for a client was a life-changing feeling for me. I’ve been seeking that dopamine rush ever since. I haven’t always succeeded. I’ve tried things that have failed. I’ve missed the mark. But hitting it always feels as good.
Today I see a lot of sellers losing faith in what they do. Based on what I experience I can understand why. They don’t like the struggle today’s economy hands them. It’s too much for too little return.
I don’t have a perfect answer for the struggle. Like Captain Kirk in Star Trek, I don’t know exactly what you, I, or anyone selling SHOULD do to succeed, but I do have an idea for what we CAN do.
What we CAN do starts with pushing for quality in every interaction, every deliverable, every ounce of value provided to the client. Go for a 10. I need to keep reminding myself of the same. We won’t always get it. We may hit 3 or 6 more often, but that doesn’t give us permission to stop trying – looking for ways to make what we provide that much better.
And then it’s about keeping the activity up. I’m going to share a personal, not a professional, experience here. I share it because of its meaning to me in shaping a sales career.
I found myself working as a missionary in the favelas of Brazil at age 20. It was my only experience in true door-to-door sales, and it was the hardest work I’ve ever done. l did it from 9:30 am to 9:30 pm, six days a week for two years. Rejection was constant. The heat was oppressive. It was a chaotic and dangerous place.
Someone handed me a stapled together, Xerox’d copy of Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World. I read it and made notes in it late at night and early in the morning, in every moment I wasn’t out on the doors.
One evening I was going door to door with C. Gomez, a great-hearted Brazilian from the Northeast of Brazil. His foot was hurting him badly, and he wanted to go home. It was almost 9 pm so we could have easily turned in and justified a hard day’s work with no success. But Og Mandino’s words to the salesman kept ringing in my head, “try and try and try again.” I sensed that something good was nearby if I could just hang on long enough to find it.
“Give me four more houses”, I asked. He agreed. At house number three, a middle-aged man walked out, very surprised to see us. We explained what we were doing, and, to our surprise, he invited us in. We sat down on one of two sofas in a small concrete living room and said hello to a second guy sitting across from us.
This second fellow gave us the strange look of strange looks. Then I noticed the drug paraphernalia on the coffee table. This man had just shot up and, I assume, thought we were apparitions from a bad drug trip. We started talking, sharing, helping. You could see the interest build inside the guy who let us in. He didn’t take the drugs that night or ever after. Long story short, he changed his life. He became a better husband, a better father, a better man. I went back to that neighborhood a few decades later. I met his adult daughter. She was a toddler when I first met him, trapped in a broken family heading downward. She was married to a successful husband and had given beautiful grandchildren to that man who let us in all those years earlier.
Generations of lives changed because we knocked a few more doors before turning in. Looking back, the best people I met in those favelas, I met at 9:15 at night, or 11:45 in the morning when it would have been just as easy to turn in or take an early lunch.
I find success comes a few tries after I start to convince myself it’s no longer worth trying.
And that’s what I love about sales – the Karate Kid element.
Prospecting, meetings that don’t go as we’d like, objections, uncomfortable negotiations, disappointments – are like sanding the floor, painting the fence and the house. All that effort and struggle can make us cynical, or it can open our eyes to what we’ve learned and the more patient, disciplined, kind, and curious people this profession makes of us – and hopefully we’ve made a little money along the way.
Spence Wixom
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