I’d Already Decided ‘NOT TODAY’. Then I Met a Great Salesperson.

Sales still makes the world go around. I got a fresh reminder of that this week, outside of all places, a pharmacy.

I'd taken my 14-year-old in for a sports physical — the kind of appointment that exists because a school athletic form needs a doctor's signature by a certain date. On the way in, a young man was standing near the entrance signing people up for recurring monthly donations to a major international humanitarian organization. I gave my son my best "back in my day" bit — we didn't used to get stopped outside the pharmacy, nobody used to try to sell you a cable package in a big-box store, nobody wanted anything from you besides your prescription. I had already decided we weren't stopping. Not a chance.

He changed my mind in about a minute.

He opened with something about my son's height — genuine, not a line — and had us both talking before I'd registered we'd stopped walking. Within a couple of minutes, he'd figured out I was a sports mom. He asked good questions, actually listened to the answers, and then brought up little things we'd mentioned several minutes earlier. Nothing felt scripted.  He had genuine banter going with my son. He knew exactly when to lean in and exactly when to ease off. He was also training another salesperson, and at one point I told her she wasn't paying close enough attention, because she was watching something worth watching.

Twenty minutes after arriving with a firm NO already decided, I'd signed up for eighteen months of recurring donations. I also asked for his business card, because when/if I am hiring a salesperson in the near future, he checks all of the boxes. Driven and skillful to the max. 

There's a hot tub and pool retailer directly behind that pharmacy. Walking back to the car, I told my son, "That guy could sell hot tubs." We already own one. I think he still could have sold me another.

I've spent more than fifteen years in marketing, and running into someone that good is humbling in a specific way. One of my real professional regrets is that I never deliberately built my own sales muscle. I've spent years learning demand generation, positioning, lifecycle marketing, content, lead generation, the machinery that gets someone's attention and puts them in front of an opportunity. Standing in front of another human being, reading what they actually want, and asking directly for the sale is a different skill. Marketing doesn't teach it to you by osmosis. I think every ambitious young professional should sell something, face to face, for a while, and take the no's that come with it.

I've watched this up close for years at trade shows. You can build the best booth in the hall — signage, sponsorship dollars, sharp collateral, a lead-capture system wired straight into the CRM — put the wrong person behind the table, and watch almost nothing happen. Put a genuinely good salesperson in a forgettable ten-by-ten with a broken monitor, and watch them create opportunities out of nothing. The booth is infrastructure. The person is the whole game.

I went looking for language for what I'd just watched and ended up back at a 2011 book called Sales Eats First. Its argument is bigger than "salespeople matter": the best companies don't treat sales as the department that shows up after marketing has done the thinking. Sales is where the company actually learns what customers want. As Robert Essner, the former CEO of Wyeth, put it in one of the book's endorsements, companies that keep sales and sales thinking "at their center" outperform the ones that treat it as subordinate.

Which is what I keep thinking about as AI takes over more of the sales process. It can research the prospect, write the outreach, summarize the call, update the CRM, handle the follow-up. Great. I use this stuff all the time.

But it wasn't doing what this kid was doing.

He noticed my son's height. Figured out pretty quickly that I was a sports mom. Read my reactions. Remembered things we'd said. Adjusted as he went.

AI could have done a beautiful job summarizing that conversation afterward. But it didn't have the conversation. He did.

And he did it with two people who had already decided they weren't stopping.

The easier we make the mechanics of selling, the more valuable I think the ability to actually sell becomes.

Here's the bigger version of that thought. My whole career has been an arms race in everything surrounding the sale: better targeting, better lists, better sequencing, better personalization, better attribution. Billions of dollars, collectively, spent getting the right person to the right conversation at the right moment. And then, eventually, two human beings still have to talk. I see it in home services all the time, too: enormous spend generating the next lead, comparatively little invested in what happens when the phone actually rings. We've gotten very good at everything around the sale. I'm not sure we've gotten better at selling.

I told my son afterward that I'm increasingly convinced every kid should have to sell something before adulthood. Pest control. Solar. Hot tubs. Encyclopedias, if we can find any. Knock on doors. Talk to strangers. Hear no a hundred times. Learn to listen. Learn to ask. Learn to keep talking after you hear “no.” 

One thing I'm certain of: that kid has a bright future selling big-ticket items.