I’d been with the company all of two hours when the first customers of the day walked in. They were a middle aged couple, a husband and  wife. It was a large mall music store, the old-fashioned narrow rectangular piano and organ store with  a few token acoustic guitars in the back. The kind that relied on “front pumping”, or the act of playing an organ in the front of the store to attract mall traffic. Mind you, I’m a guitar player. I’d never touched an electronic organ in my life. I was alone on the floor with an older guy “from the home office” (words I would later learn to dread) who was purported to be the “District Manager”. Exactly how one is the district manager within an entire company of three stores, I’m not sure. Anyway, this 50-something white-haired grizzled veteran of the piano and organ game stood behind the counter and cleaned the shelves as the customers approached slowly, looking at this organ or that. My first sales lesson came abruptly and in a mortifying fashion when I turned and looked at him to ask what I should do. 

“ Show them something.”  was his expert sales advice. Show them something? Seriously? Not, watch how I sell this part of the organ, or this little demonstration here is a catchy one, not ask great questions like these, or break the ice and get to know them; but Show them something? Talk about a high wire without a net. Two hours earlier, I was unemployed. Since then, I’d filled out tax forms and learned how to ring up clarinet reeds. Now I was expected to essentially prove my mettle in front of a 30-year veteran of the very act I was about to perform.  The “mettle” I speak about is of no other sort than the temerity it takes to actually greet a customer and attempt to serve them even though you don’t know the FIRST thing about the merchandise. This is the essence, or the spirit of selling. It’s that nerve and moxie which most great salespeople all have in common. We’re willing to fail. We’re willing to fail in dramatic and horrific fashion. We often do.

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The payoff to the story has already been delivered. Of course I eventually sold the customers an organ (what kind of storyteller would I be if I didn’t?), relying on help from others in Product Knowledge and my own general knowledge about music and sound. The answer to “how?” is that my instincts took over, and instead of trying to act as though I knew anything about the merchandise or put on a demonstration worthy of commission, I simply said, “How are you folks doing today?” And the rest was a process of following bread crumbs. What I didn’t know then was that it always is. From a $.25  guitar pick to a $2.5M consulting sale, the process isn’t different.

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The day that I figured out that I was indeed a sales thoroughbred it was not a good day at all. I had long since left the piano and organ store in the country mall for the excitement of the big city of Columbus, Ohio. There I had just been promoted to “East Store Combo Department Manager”, within a chain of seven stores, with actual Districts and actual District Managers. It was a Friday morning, and I was at the Main Store about 20 miles from my store, meeting with the “Combo Department Manager” for the entire chain and the rest of the “guitar guys”.

“ You have to go.” Said Justin Collins* , Owner of all seven stores and the son of the founder. “Me? What’s up?” I watched the blood drain from his face as he said “The East store is burning.” At first I quite frankly didn’t believe him. “You want me to leave and go to the East store because it’s on fire?” “That’s what I’m telling you, yes.” came the reply. Not entirely convinced that it wasn’t a practical joke, I left for the East store. When I neared my store’s exit from the outerbelt, I knew the tragic truth written in the smoke over my shopping center. What I wasn’t prepared for was the damage.

Squish  was the sound my first step made in my store’s piano department. The squish was the two inches of water leftover from what was surely four or five at one point. The smoke was a smell I would become intimately familiar with over the next eight weeks, as its residue shook from every nook, cranny, crack, crevice, bump or bulge in the store. As I made my way back toward the other departments, the devastation continued: The Point of Sale computers, credit card machines, faxes, printers, copiers and phones along with all of our store’s printed records were permanently destroyed. The guitar department fared somewhat better, but overall the store’s inventory was a near-total loss. It was the saddest thing an artist or musician could see short of true tragedy.

And that’s when the truth rang in my head as clearly as a bell: It was a true tragedy. This was my income and my only income. With a new baby and a struggling marriage, one thing that actually would be tragic is the inability to feed or otherwise properly care for that baby. Holy shit. At that particular moment, when many would have simply slipped into a depression or self-pity, it happened that a firefighter entered my viewing frame with an axe and a hose, which broke my dream-like gaze into the nightmare of nothingness that was about to be my income for many weeks. Once again, it does not matter how I did it, because the process isn’t different. What matters is that I did it, which is sell that firefighter a new guitar and guitar amp on the spot for only the 20% smoke damage discount of which it was really deserving. The point is again not that I was able to ask the right questions or demonstrate the right benefit, but that I considered the firefighter a legitimate sales opportunity to begin with. Put yourself into the middle of all of that devastation and tell me, would you?

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