Sales Isn’t Easy, But It Sure Is Worth It

My father would tell me when I was very young, “If a job is difficult it must have value and the reason so few people pursue it is due to its difficulty.” He must have said that when I was in high school and thinking of going into medicine. It wasn’t until years later that I made a career out of sales. Guess what, that saying still applies and it applies especially to sales. Do you realize that selling is one of the most highly compensated of all professions. Sales people are in the top five percent of all wage earners. I coach a twenty-nine year old man who earned over a quarter of a million dollars last year. Another young twenty-seven year old was making ten dollars an hour working in a parts department a year ago and is now making ten thousand dollars a month as a sales person. A seasoned executive resigned his position and a comfortable six-figure income to more than double his earnings as a sales person.

Selling isn’t easy or everyone would be doing it. Selling is truly a career that compensates its practitioners proportionately for all their time and effort. You can’t give sales a half-hearted effort and expect to receive a full effort income; it can’t be done. Highly compensated sales people work as hard at selling as top surgeons in medicine or top attorneys in the legal profession, or any other top performing and highly compensated professional. Selling requires an extreme effort and daily improvement to reach an extreme income. In sales your income is typically tied directly to your performance. Unlike executives that drive a business to bankruptcy and then give themselves million dollar bonuses, sales people receive an income commensurate to their performance.

Those things in life that come too easily are often the things appreciated the least. As sales people work and study to perfect their skills, they gain a greater appreciation of their profession and the financial rewards within their grasp. They gain a depth of understanding that what they are doing reaches far beyond the personal rewards and extends to a higher plain, that of providing service to others. Selling isn’t easy, but it sure feels good to help people solve their problems and meet their needs. A few years ago while traveling in Alaska as part of one of my client incentive trips, I came across a tree growing out of solid rock. There was no soil to nourish the tree, only a crack in a solid rock mass several hundred yards in diameter. The effort that tree made to sprout and grow became the strength necessary to survive the harsh arctic environment.

Becoming a successful sales person is no different than that tree. If you can over come the trials and opposition that sales people face each day, the time will come when you will reap abundant rewards of character and wealth. Everyone that enters the world of sales will not succeed. Everyone is not willing to pay the price necessary for success. I was training a young sales person a few years ago; a young man that I truly believed had promise. After a few days of discouragement and rejection, he came to me and said he was not “cut out” for a career in sales. Based on his attitude I had to agree. He wasn’t willing to pay the price. One of my favorite poems, Good Timber, by Douglas Malloch, recounts the growth of a tree while overcoming the obstacles of nature to grow and develop. The tree that flourishes in spite of opposition has the strength of root and trunk to survive and ultimately thrive. This poem creates a great analogy comparing the growth of a tree to that of a man. I like to think of that man as becoming a highly successful sales person. I share the poem with you – enjoy.

Good Timber
By Douglas Malloch

The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.

Good timber does not grow with ease,
The stronger wind, the stronger trees,
The further sky, the greater length,
The more the storm the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.

Where thickest lies the forest growth
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.