The 2 jobs we’re going to name are probably among the most looked-down-upon, and even among the toughest and most demanding. We are talking, of course, about working as a waiter and working as a door-to-door salesperson.
I often hear that these are the jobs people turn to when they don’t know how to do anything else, and that’s something I have always strongly disagreed with. The way I see it, these 2 professions are precisely the ones almost nobody is prepared for, and I would recommend them to anyone as a way to gain knowledge they will never learn in a course or at university.
Just as having a piano at home doesn’t make you a pianist and having a child doesn’t make you a good parent, and just as being handed a massage diploma sometimes gives you about the same massage skills as a lumberjack, let’s look at what these two professions, which I was lucky enough to work in and learn from, can offer us.
1. Working as a waiter
I spent a long time behind a bar, in the summer months even more than 12 hours a day, and all of it before I came of age. In my town it was legal to work at 14 🙂
A wise old man used to say that if you want to learn to understand people and human psychology in depth, don’t go to psychology school; get behind a bar. And how right that wise old man was. If you pay attention to people, there comes a point where, as soon as a person or group walks in, the waiter knows whether they’re going to cause trouble or skip out on the bill. You can even play at guessing how long a couple you’re seeing for the first time have been together, just from the way they behave with each other. And all of it with a minimal margin of error.
From behind a bar you watch people not as they present themselves at work, but as they really are. The way a person asks for things, and even how they treat a waiter, tells you everything about who they are in every other part of their life.
When I started studying people’s body language so I could later use it in sales and negotiations, it was as if I already had a natural instinct for it, when in reality I think it was partly down to the years spent watching thousands of faces, gestures and expressions.
But you don’t only learn from a hard job: shy people end up losing their shyness. You even stop being an introvert and gain resources for resolving conflicts (there’s usually the odd one).
While I would advise anyone, especially young people and whatever their financial status, to get behind a bar, I would also advise them never to settle into this profession for life. It’s fun for a few years, but after that… well… too much of anything gets tiring.
2. Door-to-door sales
For me, working as a door-to-door salesman was the best university I ever had. I even came to think that, having devoted myself to that world and climbed the ladder in it, those years of my sales career would open the doors to any job. I was wrong about that part: over time I had to remove that stage from my CV, because the successes I had achieved impressed no one, and I even noticed that some managers frowned upon it.
Likewise, we are not talking about spending a couple of years in this world and scraping by. We are talking about working in direct (door-to-door) sales and earning more money than most adults.
Where is the mastery in this job?
A former boss once told me:
“Think about what we do. You’re now heading to the home of a woman who has just taken her children to school; her husband has gone to work like every other day, and she’ll be thinking about what to cook, maybe even about having a nice relaxing bath. But what she doesn’t know is that within an hour she’s going to spend 150,000 pesetas (900 euros). And she’s going to spend money she hadn’t planned to spend because we are very good at what we do.”
And the truth is that this happened with one in every four people (that was our sales PER, or visits-to-sales ratio).
As you can imagine, after that, when it comes to a negotiation or a potential customer who might be thinking of buying, whether they’re sure, have doubts or have different offers from other companies, there’s a very high chance that customer will be mine.
In other words, after working in the toughest kind of selling there is, the rest of selling didn’t just become easier: it became “a piece of cake”.
Of course, it’s another kind of job that ends up burning anyone out, but the lessons you learn in it, if you work with the right professionals (and not with hustlers and windbags), are invaluable.
That’s why I have said on several occasions that I didn’t like my sales force to be chosen by a Human Resources department. I liked to choose them myself, and above all I looked for this kind of profile, because I knew that someone who had been successful in that world for several years would not only be grateful for the new opportunity with much better working conditions, but would also become a star salesperson.
At this point you’re probably picturing the typical, pathetic travelling salesman with a briefcase, bothering people in their homes. “Poor wretch…”, more than one of you will think. And yes, I suppose that’s how some people saw us back then.
What they didn’t see was that many of us were making between 2,500 and 5,000 euros a month, not to mention the 2 million old pesetas (12,000 euros) that one of the best saleswomen I ever knew managed to make in a single month.
Remember that in the end, everything in this life comes down to a sale: in a job interview you sell yourself; if you’re looking for financing for your business, you’re selling; if you want to win a woman over, you need to know how to sell, and so on.
There are two things that will help you succeed: knowing how to sell and financial education.
Further reading
- 15 habits of successful salespeople
- 5 things I learned in sales that apply to business
- 4 truths about the art of negotiation
- 7 sales principles to prepare the ground for success
Featured image: Daquella manera, CC0 1.0, via Flickr.
