“Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?”
- Willy Loman, “Death of a Salesman”
Every salesperson has a Willy Loman somewhere deep in his or her heart of darkness. A frightened boy-man who understands the power of confidence, the magic of conviction. The path to success does not exclude the presence of Willy Loman in a salesperson’s soul: it merely separates those who successfully negotiated Loman’s demons at any cost from those who couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. In an imaginary sequel to Arthur Miller’s epic story, one could conceive a surreal version of It’s a Wonderful Life, but in reverse: Willy gets to find out what his life would have been if he had been a successful salesman, at any cost. In the end, he begs his guardian angel to return him to his life of anonymity. An ordinary life, as his son Biff had begged him to consider. A life where he did not sell his soul for thirty pieces of silver.
Selling is relationship-building. Nothing more, nothing less. Barring a few irrelevant exceptions, buyers will almost always find their way to sellers they trust, or like, even if they end up paying more. The lowest bidder is a hit-and-run sub-segment of capitalism, the stuff that floats like debris but never runs deep.
Well over a decade ago I decided that selling was at the heart of what we all do. Whether we know it or we don’t. Children sell clowning or good behavior in exchange of their parents approval. Lovers sell their best behavior in exchange for the promise of undying love. Professionals sell a perception of irreplaceability in exchange for job security. And successful business leaders-statesmen sell whatever you’re buying. And they’re damn good at it. Believe them, nobody does it better. Nobody.
It would be a sin of false-equivalence to say that all business leaders or statesmen have sold their souls to be where they are. The truth is, we have no way of knowing the true proportion of constructive vs. destructive forces on that front. Pick your battles carefully there, and pray to the gods of mercy that you were more right than wrong at the end of your day.
Mercy being what it is, Willy Loman is not the only one that dies in the end. Destructive salesmen-statesmen sooner or later die as well. Figuratively or literally. And karma being what it is, the statesman who can no longer tell the difference between selling and lying has already been dead inside for years.
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