Dear sales managers: Read this if you want your customers to not hate you
How to win friends and influence people, sales edition
I had to buy a new sofa this month. We had this whole weird warranty thing with the old sofa so I had to go to this national furniture chain to actually buy the set. And I was dreading this task for weeks beforehand, because sales culture is awful. It’s just brutal, unpleasant stuff. A modern sales-based enterprise—like this national furniture chain—is a weird, almost dreamlike world in which the animating principles and motivations and incentives are unlike anything you’re likely to encounter in your normal daily life. Sales culture requires its workers to become weirdly ungainly and socially klutzy; they look at you in weird ways and they speak to you with weird syntaxes and they carry themselves differently, standing near you sort of awkwardly and clumsily, as if they don’t really know how to be around other people without feeling stressed about it. Which I guess if you’re working for commission is probably true. I feel for these people, I get why they’re nervous wrecks, I wish it weren’t this way for them, but man I just don’t like to be in that environment if I can help it.
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