Total clowns. An utter disgrace. Every time I attend a business conference or tradeshow, I am floored by how feckless these company sales reps are. In my experience, these folks tend to fall into one of the following categories:
Leisure Suit Larry: My first thought as this clown approached me was whether his bargain basement suit would start melting under the heat-lamp. My second concern was that the very same heat-lamp would ignite the blizzard of dandruff draping his shoulders and he'd spontaneously burst into flames. This guy was a walking fire hazard. 10 minutes this jamoke talked to me, I didn't hear a word he said. The first five I mapped out all the fire exits and watched vigilantly to see if his flakes would turn into orange embers. The final five I wrestled with the classic chicken or the egg dilemma. Was this loser the inspiration behind the legendary computer game character or did he in fact model his life after Larry Laffer? Where the fuck did this freak come from? Did he even attend the conference or was he holed up in a dive bar all day drinking cheap whiskey? No, sir, I will not be buying your product. Get a head-to-toe makeover so that it doesn’t look like you live in your car, then we can talk.
The Jukebox: This is the guy who shows up every two years pitching the same company but a completely different product or service. Enterprise Architecture, Cybersecurity, Salesforce Implementation, Cloud, PMO support, AI. He’s got it all, and his company is a “recognized expert” in the space. It’s uncanny how their “expertise” follows along with every trendy, business buzzword. Guys like this are scum. Shameless charlatans. Toss him a quarter and he’ll play you any tune you want.
The Colonialist: I once worked for one. The CEO of my company had somehow formed a business “partnership” with an Inuit tribe in Alaska which gave us tax-exempt status. I always assumed that the rich, non-Eskimos that actually ran the company would fly out to Alaska once a year, throw some crumbs at the chief, and get him to re-up the paperwork. Fret not though my dear reader, no minorities were ever exploited. It was actually even worse than that. Turns out that “chief” was a dude named Randall who was white as the Alaskan snow but claimed some extremely distant Native American heritage. Brutal. I last ran into a colonialist in 2019. “I have disabled veterans status, black-owned business status, woman-owned,…. Pick a card, any card, I have it.” This is verbatim what this liquored up piece of shit bragged to me about.
The Bulldozer: So eager, so aggressive. This person is almost always a foreigner. The bulldozer talks faster than Bizzy Bone and tosses a different product pitch your way every 20 seconds. This was $1000, but she has a payment plan that makes it only $900, but you can get an in-store discount. Try this product too. In the meantime, some groveling chaiwalla brings you stale coffee to try and butter you up. My favorites are the ones that bring out an old school calculator and start frantically typing in numbers and reciting them back to you. I once asked the salesman if I could see his calculator. Sheer panic. They weren’t ready to be called out. I suspect that the batteries in the calculator died back in 2008.
The Digital Guy. This guy’s tactic (and it is always a man, I will explain why later) is to patronize you. Usually, a kid in his late 20s that essentially tells you that you’re a dinosaur. You don’t understand the micro-moments when people make buying decisions, the algorithms that allow you capitalize on these moments, the customer journey….. luckily The Digital Guy is here with his exorbitantly priced offering that will transform you from a business fossil to a modern-day moneymaking machine. I cut these clowns down to size quickly:
“I don’t like computers”. Then I walk away, leaving this pitiful imbecile stunned and bewildered like a shot fighter who yet again got KO-ed.
Sales is 70% of the game and good sales people are very, very hard to find. Like many other things in life, you can also tell pretty much right away if the person is good or not. Is this someone who can sell ice to an eskimo or one of the aforementioned buffoons?
Furthermore, it is this jamoke’s humble opinion that women tend to be way better at sales than men. I say that not because I am some chump simp, but because (let’s face it boys) women are 10x more skilled than us at sizing people up. Watching my female friends sizing up dudes at the bar back in the day was endlessly entertaining and illuminating:
“Why don’t you go talk to him, he seems decent looking?”
“That guy!? Let me tell you about that guy! Pleated khakis, New Balance shoes, a Lacoste shirt and a bad haircut. I know his mommy bought him those pants cause if he actually went shopping for himself he would have looked in the mirror at the store and seen that those pleats give him front-butt. The shoes are his personal choice, an odd one given that he doesn’t look much like a runner and sneakers and khakis are fashion faux-pas. The Lacoste shirt is nice but coupled with the SuperCuts haircut it tells me that this guy wants to flash brand (i.e. money) but doesn’t have an overall sense of style, otherwise he’d get a proper coiffure. He doesn’t care about looking good, he cares about showing off his cash. I ain’t wasting my time talking to that momma’s boy, rich-boy, snob who doesn’t’ have the self-discipline to even go for the occasional run.”
Dang!
While the Jukebox, the Colonialist, and, of course, Leisure Suit Larry are rehearsing their sales pitch and drinking a Captain and Coke for added courage, homegirl has already analyzed the entire room. She’s separated the contenders from the pretenders, the true buyers from the support staff, and she’s ready to bring in that revenue. If a female saleswoman had approached me last month instead of all these bozos, I surely would not have spent 10 minutes spacing out and wondering if Selsun Blue is still on the market. But let’s be honest here, having already separated the wheat from the chaff in 10 milliseconds, a saleswoman wouldn’t have wasted her time approaching me in the first place.
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