Things I've Learned In Life So Far: Never Apply, Interview, and Accept an Entry Level Sales Job.

It's been over a week since the Living Blog was updated. I apologize for not remaining committed to writing on this. I do have an excuse, and it's, "Things have been kind of crazy the past week."

You can probably gather from the title what we're talking about today, boys and girls. Afterall, that's what titles are for, to give you somewhat of an idea of what this massacre of phonetic symbols is going to communicate.

All right. Where do I begin...

Monday, February 15th, 2010. A normal day if I do say so myself. At first. Two days prior I spent a few hours on my laptop at the Bread Co. on Olive browsing Career Builder. I found a lot of listings for entry level marketing jobs (Entry level sounded good. A guy fresh out of college likes the sound of that, mostly because a fellow like myself has found a lot of jobs asking for 3 or 5+ years field experience, which at this point in my life, I just don't have. There's a lot of jobs I just don't have the qualifications for...except for these entry level jobs which exclaim, "No Experience Necessary!"). Of course, I'm easily enticed. I figure there could be a fair chance of landing one of these jobs. I apply for a couple, find a writing job in Clayton which I also apply for (I never heard from them though. They're legit I'm sure, since they didn't come begging to me for an interview. They probably found a very qualified individual very quickly and went on their merry way). I sit back, take a sip of coffee, and hope for the best.

So we get to Monday. I get two calls from two of the places saying they want to set up interviews the next day. Giddy with excitement, I agree, schedule the interviews, and then run out to get some nice clothes. My father slips a few twenties into my hand, and I rush out to find something nice. I get a nice blue shirt, a nice sports jacket, a couple ties, some nice shoes, and come back home to prepare to tackle the world.

Tuesday comes and goes. I go to both interviews, get an idea of the jobs, asked by both to come back for a second interview (which was pretty much in spending a couple hours in the field, seeing what they do).

So I'm excited, completely unaware of the lies and deciet. I rest easily.

I go to the first job. They are a company in the auto glass repair market. Now, red flag number one: I come in, sit down, wait, and see some of these entry level guys preparing for a road trip to a location in Arkansas. One guy has a couple grocery bags with loaves of bread and snacks. I'm fine with it. We all need some snacks when we go on long drives. We're freaking Americans, we need to eat all the freaking time. So the manager (the man who interviewed me) says, "Well, when I go on trips I usually eat out." Poor kid, brainwashed and pulled into this mess says, "Yeah, I've had a lot of bills this week so I only have eight bucks in my wallet." Are we serious? This is the major bank going on here? This guy works his butt off here, and has barely enough to scrape by?

All right, so I go out with two girls and this guy Tim. Now, here's what they do on a day to day basis: They go to these "events" at car washes and and gas stations. They have permission to be there, but what they do is they try to "fit in" like this is some covert operation and clean customer's windows. As they do, they look for chips and small cracks in the windshield. When they find one, they mention it to the customer, tell them if they have full coverage the service is free, and then fill in the chip/small crack right there on the spot.

As you can imagine, all though it's not completely terrible, it still felt...if I could invent a term..."scammy". I will say the employees were nice about it, and didn't try to press anything onto these people (or at least trick them, or hold them down until they agreed to have their windshield fixed), but I still thought this whole thing was a sham. Sure, there was this faint promise in the future to reach managment level, but the goals were unrealistic. Plus, I didn't want to spend eight hours of my day in the freezing cold. As you can probably already gather, I didn't properly express my passion for the job, so Tim called Nick (the manager. Funny Story actually, the managers of both places I interviewed for are named Nick) at the end of the "second interview" and then gave the phone to me. Talked to Nick, and he told me they would call. Haven't heard back since Wednesday. Thank God.

Trabajo Numero Dos. This job was VERY similar to the other one. Later on Wednesday I met with a guy named Maxwell Harrison to do pretty much what I had done only a few hours before and that was shadow his lousy sales job. I did for a couple hours. It wasn't too bad. At least it was a little better gig than the windshield repair. I was warm and inside and things seemed like they would be okay.

Job description: Basically, this company has people go to Home Depots around the area, walk around with a binder, and sell people free in-home consultations.

"Sell them something free? How does that work Michael? Do tell."

Well, basically I walk up, tell them who I am, ask them how old their home is, and if they had done anything with the kitchen cabinets. If they were new, I would be on my way. If they were old and crappy and they wanted to change the look of them, I would tell them about the resurfacing project and have them sign up to have an appointment. At the appointment, people from Home Depot would come out, talk about ideas with the potential customer, give a quote, and the customer would decide if they want to to do it or not.

Of course, with anything you try to sell, there is a big "No Factor". Now, they told me about "The Law of Averages". Basically, for every no you get, there's bound to be a yes coming. This of course is a lie and a sham.

Anyway, I want to get into more detail about that later. I'm getting ahead of myself.

So, I meet with Maxwell. Walk around with him. Talk with him. I start lying to myself and saying, "I could do this. Maybe this will be okay." The time with Max goes well, he calls Nick, talks to him, then tells me to leave the Home Depot where we're at (On South Lindbergh) and go to where Nick is at, the Home Depot on Manchester. I visit Nick, we talk a little more. He gives me the job, I agree (I shouldn't have) and leave.

Now. Thursday, February 18th, 2010. First day on the job. I get to the "office" (I put it in quotes because, although the top level of this building is an office and thats the HQ for this company, there's multiple companies/businesses that use the office [I believe] and the office for Systematic Services, as far as I could tell, was just Nick's little office way in the back of the catacombs. Oh, and there was a break room, but I'm still pretty sure that was communal). I fill out paper work, listen to a little lesson on the "Five Steps" (What they use to talk to people and pitch their sale) and then we were on our way.

I was assigned to be with Maxwell again to be trained. The office is in Chesterfield and we were told to go back to the South Lindbergh Home Depot (roughly about 35 mins with light traffic). Max doesn't have a car. Great. So I drive both of us. I talk to Max on the way about a number of things. There is mostly business talk, but we also discuss other things. I find out Nick (the manager guy) Joey (an employee) and Max are all living in Nick's aunt's house. Now, they haven't been in town all that long, but long enough they should be able to find a place and...oh, I don't know....pay for it with the "good" money they're making (also, the previous day Maxwell slammed 9-5 jobs because no matter how much work you put in, you only make what's on the paycheck, and then when you retire you don't have money. What he fails to realize is he's not really making money now and that there is SO much work put into this that whatever money you make it will never be worth it [By the way, the job was 6 days a week. And to give you an idea of the hours, I went in at 10:30, went through a normal day, came back to the office, left around 7. Today they wanted me to come in at 9. No way.])

Sorry, tangents.

So we get to Home Depot. Sign in. I watch him, then I start to get my feet wet and try it myself. In the end, I walked around Home Depot 700 times for 6 hours. We took a couple five minute breaks. The first one was mostly so I could practice the pitch with Maxwell. The other one was a legitimate sit down, relax, realize how much this sucks break. No lunch. Just straight sales. They even said before we left that there's an hour for lunch, but they don't take it because that just eats into sale time (haha...lunch...eats in....man, where do I come up with this stuff?).

What kind of hell condones sacrificing an important meal time just to hound more people?

Sorry. Tangent again.

So we do this forever. Max gets 2 leads. I get none. He says that's typical for the first day. And I think I want to pull a gardening hoe down and chop someone up with it to release some tension. Just a little.

Now, he calls this a slow day. The day before when I was with him, he got a lead before I came. With that said, earlier on Thursday when I came in they had a total of 31 leads. So lets do some math here. Without me, there is 5 people. So with 31 leads, that gives each about 6. Of course this is with the assumption that they all make about the same, which there is error in that, but with what I'm showing, there is wiggle room. So, it's Thursday and they've had about 3 days. So if we continue with MY mathmatic reasoning, that makes for 2 leads per day. Now, if you'll recall, for Max at least, 2 leads is a slow day. Bull. It's average, and they're trying to con me into this trap.

At 6 o' clock, with my belly aching for food, we leave the store and go back to the office. I deal with the mess of traffic on 64. I consider smashing the car and killing us both, but I'm not quite over the edge. Actually, once we left Home Depot, I believe I felt better. But I had to spend and eternity in there first. We make it back to the office, they tell me to come in at 9 in the morning and I bid them goodnight.

As you can tell, I called today and quit the job. I have more dignity. I want a salary and benifits. And freaking lunch! Even if I do talk to a bunch of people into this free service, they still have to make the decision to reface the cabinets. That's where I would make money. What little I would make.

It's a sham, a lie, a trick, and I've learned a valuable lesson from all of this: Never apply to entry level sales/marketing jobs, especially when they have multiple postings on Career Builder and have the posting in big, capital letters. They're cheating you out of time and sanity and will only feed you propaganda like, "Law of Averages" and "Postive Attitude" and "Strong Work Ethic".

Thanks guys. But I'll take my 9-5 job any day. You can take this job and...well, you know the rest.