I do not know who needs this blog or why I am writing this again after shutting down the website twice, but the pull is still there. When I started working in sales, I was hungry for personal stories – not the ones posted on LinkedIn every week or featured as examples of how to become the #1 salesperson in guru self-help books. I was looking for human stories of everyday lives of salespeople – ordinary, boring, fascinating, and endlessly relatable to what I was going through. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 1.2 million people work in B2B sales alone with about 13 million people having sales and sales-related occupations, making up 10% of all jobs nationally. And this number is increasing every year. It blows my mind how popular this profession has become and how little it is represented in media, print, cinema, or even blogs. And when I say, “represented,” I allude to the diversity of experience one can have in sales, debunking the myths we are stuck with from wolves of Wall street or stock jocks of the boiler rooms.
Sales is human. It is about people selling to people, buying from people, and working with people. And when people interact with people, they create stories – stories of high stakes, missed opportunities, big ticket deals, gruesome competition, layoffs. I want to read such stories. On a bad day, after a disastrous demo call, I want to take a book or open a blog and read stories of my fellow salespeople, laughing at their missteps and crying with them over a lost deal. Not AI-written posts about “7 steps to hit your quota” on LinkedIn. Not even sales success stories on podcasts. Less curated, less orchestrated, less salesy. And much, much more human, real.
If you are in sales or thinking of going into sales, what stories do YOU want to hear?
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