Sell… or Die Trying
Darcy Carroll | Account Manager at Ward Technology Talent | Twitter | LinkedIn
Why Don’t Business Schools Teach the Science of Selling?
Most business school students take away two things from their $50,000+ education: how to deal with 500mg of caffeine in their system and that the lifeline of every company is their ability to generate cash. I don’t remember any of my business school professors quoting Snoop Dogg (or Lion, who knows what animal he will come up with next) when explaining the importance of cash-flow but hey, it’s the Friday before a long weekend, so why not?
‘Money, money is everything
It’s crack to the fiend
It’s the king to the queen
It reigns supreme’
You may laugh, but rappers are probably some of the most entrepreneurial minds in our society today. Whether it’s 50-Cent through his entrepreneurial endeavours (everyone has heard of his early investment in Vitamin-Water) or Jay-Z’s involvement with basically every aspect of the entertainment industry, they get it. They may use different terms for ‘generating cash-flow’, but they understand that without money, they are nothing.
Business headlines these days are dominated by companies like Instagram, Waze, or Tumblr getting millions of users, making essentially no money, and then selling to a Facebook, Google, or Yahoo. I do believe that the latter trio will find a way to monetize these companies, but these success stories paint a very unrealistic picture of what life is really like out in the place people like to call the real world.
Introducing yourself in the fourth paragraph is like getting the name of a girl on the 3rd date, but as I said earlier, the excitement of the long weekend has my mind in a completely different realm.
Selling Yourself
My name is Darcy and I started working at Ward Technology Talent, Toronto’s best IT staffing agency, a couple of weeks back. Prior to that, I was a student at the Richard Ivey School of Business. My first week at Ward Tech Talent has been a whirlwind. My official job position here is that of an account manager. But to be an account manager, you need to get accounts. And to get accounts, you have to sell. And to sell, you not only have to sell the company and what value it can give, but you also have to sell yourself. This brings me to the whole point of this 500 word manifesto. In my two years of business school I learned a lot about how do competitive analyses, prepare financial reports, and generally anything that a consultant would have to do in his day-to-day job.
But what I didn’t learn was how to pick up the phone and talk to someone that has no idea who I am and try to entertain the man or woman long enough to maybe get a face-to-face meeting. If I’m lucky, I get a job order which could, keyword could, generate some cash. If generating cash is truly the lifeline of the company, shouldn’t we be taught things that can make that happen? Ward Technology Talent is a rather small company, and I understand that things are different in much larger companies, where the sales department is more streamlined, and where marketing plays a larger role on the cash-generating ability of the company. But I still think that the role of a business school should be to prepare you, not just to work in a Fortune 500 company, but also if you want to start your own company where pounding on doors and cold-calling is the only way you can keep the lights on.
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