Positive Employment: Positive Selling

Good selling means uniting a customer base with things it really requires to flourish, to thrive, to LIVE WELL, which means that there is a lot more room for honest selling than we are perhaps currently ready to acknowledge.

The Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman – first performed in 1949 – is full of pathos and compassion climaxing around the death of Willy Loman, the exhausted, disappointed, middle-aged salesman of the title. The play has been hugely successful, moving audiences from Broadway to China to tears. We feel Willy was an ordinary, good-enough man – who deserved but didn’t get a fair share of happiness and fulfilment. His life as a salesman left him crumpled and defeated. He never accomplished anything; his life was wasted. ‘Salesman’ becomes the name of a person who lived a crummy, inauthentic life.

It’s easy to paint a grim portrait of the salesperson: someone constantly looking out for some way to take advantage of whomever they meet and trying to sell friends and strangers things they can’t afford. A salesperson is someone whose smile can’t be trusted; someone living a life of lies.

But in truth, the moral status of a salesperson isn’t fixed, it all depends on the value of what they are selling. When a doctor urgently recommends surgery to the stomach, we don’t think of this as an act of ‘salesmanship,’ because the procedure (though it might make money for many people along the way) seems plainly and objectively necessary.

This short 'course' about salesmanship takes a realistic look at sales, with more than a few good pointers along the way, continue the course.

FURTHER READING

A fundamental belief of the modern world, which explains a lot of our anxiety around failure, is that we are what we earn. When we say this, we mean something very particular: not just that it’s nice to have a lot of money but that our income is the source of information, crucial, decisive information, about our character, our intelligence, our moral fiber: in short, money is the key indicator of our worth in human and not just financial terms. The more money we make, the more we deserve to exist… You can read more on this and other subjects on our blog, here