[2003] LOSS & PORPHYRY the novels  

00060 - 1977 - Por 5 -Work/Trip back from the Paris Biomedical Conference

A further hour north along the autoroute, with the scenery largely unchanged and unchanging in character, I was still immersed in the task of putting his business life in perspective. I had then been in selling for nearly ten years, but had never quite come to terms with it. Like so many other salesmen, I had fallen into it  almost by accident, by default without making a conscious choice that it was where I saw my future. Unlike most, however, I had been on the rebound from a bad experience of junior management in one of those hire and fire companies that were the darlings of the stock market; but were just as much the despair of their employees, who were treated as an instantly disposable commodity. I had known that such firms had existed, but it had come as a considerable shock to discover that the attitude could just as easily apply to junior management as to those on the shop floor. I had been unceremoniously dispensed with. In just a matter of minutes I had been forced to make the painful adjustment from being a thrusting young executive to being one of the unemployed, guiltily wondering what I had done wrong. It was an experience whose memory still left a bitter taste in my mouth. It had shattered my trust in others for many months. At a loss for suitable employment, I had been grateful when a friend had told him that one of the largest and most famous of the computer manufacturing multi-nationals was recruiting trainee engineers and salesmen. Computers were, I was constantly being told by the media, the thing of the future; and I felt that I could bury myself out of harm's way in such an engineering force. So, with no alternative in the offing, I had gone to the interview. The outcome had not been what I had expected. I had found myself coming away from the interview persuaded that I really wanted to be a salesman, not a mere engineer; not least because the salary would be dramatically better.

Over the years I had rationalised this odd decision by deciding that the personnel manager, who had sold me this bill of goods, must have been a far better salesman that I could ever hope to be. But, even in the cold light of the following days, when no other job offer came to my rescue I found myself inexorably propelled into the job. In this way, one bright summer day I had reluctantly reported to the company's training school; to begin almost a full year of education, taught at breakneck speed somewhat beyond post-graduate level.

I had not been unduly surprised to find that I had shone at the technical subjects; one dubious benefit of my stint in junior management was that I now knew that my IQ had been measured at something in excess of 170, for whatever good that might do me. Even less surprising, though, was the fact that I did remarkably badly on all of his sales training courses. Above all I could not cope with the artificiality of the sales situation. Sales techniques proved to be an anathema to me. All I wanted to do was get out in the field and help the customers; I had already come to appreciate that was something I was good at. But I had to suffer through countless hours of  learning how to handle objections, of how to close the customer, of generally forcing the customer to buy things he didn't need and certainly didn't want. It was distasteful; but it was a job. Despite my poor performance, and my frequent protestations that I was not really a salesman, I was not removed from the sales stream; and finally, almost ignominiously, had scraped through the tests at the end of the training, to qualify rather dubiously as a salesman. It had been, therefore, with considerable trepidation that I had embarked on my sales career.

It had been a full five years before I had begun to realise that I was not actually a poor salesman. In that time I had regularly achieved all my targets with deceptive ease, and had attended all the Winners' Conventions. Despite shunning almost all the techniques that I had been to rigorously taught, and which were the standby of traditional salesmen, I was by then rarely out of the upper echelons of the company's star salesman. In the five years since that discovery my performance had remained consistently high; and I now recognised that, by some quirk of nature, I really was a good, perhaps a very good, salesman. But I had still not been able to come to terms with the role. It was almost as if it was still a temporary job, until I found a better one; though I had long since given up looking for one, and had recently turned down some approaches I might earlier have considered quite attractive. No matter how successful I was, I still didn't see myself as a true salesman. The pervasive salesman image was almost totally alien to my own self image. It was typical that, where other salesmen would have conformed to the stereotype by choosing a bright yellow car for its brash ostentation, I had made the same decision purely on the grounds that it made the car more visible to other drivers and hence safer.

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