Whenever people ask me about the radical career change from education to tech sales, I never mention my very first sales experience. Partially, because I don’t remember it well. Mostly because I was never successful in that. And I don’t want to admit it, especially to those who think one must be born to be a good salesperson, possess some sort of natural talent, charisma, the mythical “it.” A childhood experience where you volunteered to sell homemade lemonade to your neighbours, impressing everyone in the community and having the entrepreneurial summer of 1992… and that’s how it all started. Yeah, right.
Most surprising, even to myself, after digging into my memory, I did find such cliché experience in my arsenal. Summer of 2005. My friend Chiara’s dad, a businessman, opened an ice cream stand for the summer and offered his daughter and lucky me a job of selling ice-cream. I immediately agreed. Not for any monetary purposes – frankly, I don’t even remember us getting paid much – but for the fun of the adventure. Anything other than being stuck at home in summer. Everything to be around friends, not parents!
I had zero idea of what sales entailed. Nobody in my family had “the vein” for sales, as they say. A predisposition to hustling, persuading, sugarcoating, enticing, and charming people to buy. Despite negative connotations, my mom envied people who had a business mindset and dared to lead, not follow. But us? No. We didn’t have the vein for that. We were not salespeople. I don’t even remember how my parents reacted to my spontaneous desire to sell ice-cream. Most likely, they thought nothing of it. I often followed my friends in their endeavours to brighten the monotony of our summer.
The ice-cream stand was placed on one of the busiest streets in downtown and filled with all kinds of ice-cream: local brands mixed with iconic American brands like Snickers, Mars, and Twix. Chiara’s dad gave us a 15-min introduction to selling – “Do not leave the stand alone. Count the change. Sell more” – and left two 12-year olds alone in the scorching sun, waiting for the first customers. I was giggling with excitement. Here I was, with my best friend, having a cool gig and trying myself in the new role. Just like an adult. “Maybe my mom would turn out to be wrong, and I do have that rare gift of trading, the elusive vein in my body,” I thought.
Chiara and I agreed right away that we could not sell a product without trying it first. You have to know what you’re selling; otherwise, you cannot educate a customer on the difference between a caramel and toffee filling, a chocolate drizzle and chocolate chip cookie. And that’s how we started our sales gig – selling the ice-cream to ourselves, diligently putting our own coins into the cashier and playing the role of the seller and buyer at the same time. By noon, we tried all flavours, going for the 2nd round with the favourites. Occasionally, people would stop to buy an ice-cream or two, but more so to chat with two kids working like adults. It wasn’t hard at all. Talking to people, selling ice-cream to them. People voluntarily came to the stand, hoping to cool themselves down with a scoop of ice-cream. There was not much need for persuading or sugarcoating – the sugar in the ice-cream was selling itself.
The tricky part for me turned out to be counting money, fast. Making sure the change is correct. We didn’t have calculators or cell phones. We counted in our minds. I breathed out every time the customer didn’t question my change. I could not bear the thought of shortchanging the clients, even by accident.
By end of the day, math told a different story. I came home with less money than I had left with. I crashed on the couch the minute I stepped into my room. The heat, the sugar overload, and the stress of calculating change took a toll on me – I fell asleep without having dinner. Nobody saw me till next morning. And next day I had to do it all over again.
The gig didn’t last long – one week, to be precise. Seeing no profit day after day, Chiara’s dad hired an experienced salesperson instead. He, too, didn’t believe we had “the vein” to sell. Business had to prosper. Ice-cream needed to be sold, not eaten.
I never thought about this experience until I started writing this blog. It didn’t register as a core memory in my mind – maybe because I didn’t place too much value on it or maybe because I didn’t want to remember it. It does not offer a glamourous, linear story of success. It does, however, explain two important things:
One, I was not born with the right “vein” for sales, but sales found me anyway.
Two, since that experience, Snickers became my favourite ice-cream. To this day, it still is. A small frozen reminder of my first attempt at sales.
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