Wanna Bet?

How I got here; from cold calls to cable ads to coaching

We’re getting ready for a sales meeting. There are four of us in a small town in rural Washington State, in the early 1990s. Someone makes an assertion, and Jerry whips out his wallet. He pulls out a twenty with a practiced motion and throws it on the table. 

“Wanna bet?” he says. 

Jerry is the oldest guy in the room, in his 50s. If you’re selling cable advertising in rural Washington you’re either on your way up, like I was at the time, in my 20s, or you’re on your way down. Everyone lights up at the wager, wallets come out. I realize this is a sales thing. We sell airtime, 30 second increments of nothing. We work on commission. We’re all gamblers of one sort or another. We all smoke, most of us drink. I’m a few years sober at the time, so I just smoke more. 

We did cold calls. Doing cold calls is as hard as you would think. I moved to that town to take a another sales job at a radio station. They said I had a list of existing advertisers, which would mean a guaranteed income. But when I went to the station for my first day of work after moving my family there, they gave me a phone book. Here’s your list. I learned how to cold call. Straight commission, two kids, you learn how to cold call. 

Cable airtime was a step up. 

The office was a converted house with a studio downstairs to edit the local commercials. Voice over talent from Seattle was union and cost more than most of the local advertisers could afford. So they had me record the spots that needed a woman’s voice. I didn’t get paid for it. I was a journalist once, but it didn’t pay enough, and since I was a single mom with two kids I moved into sales. But when I stood in the tiny recording studio in the basement, wearing the big headphones and listening to my voice in my ears, I could pretend I was back on the radio. 

I recorded so many commercials that a friend of mine complained to me one day that she went to sleep with the TV on hearing my voice and woke up with the TV on hearing my voice.

Years later, I was having lunch in a fancy restaurant in Seattle. At the time, I was selling advertising agency services. In Adland they call it business development because they’re above “sales”. I was having lunch with a banker. The bank was our client, and I was hoping this banker would refer me to some other business. I’m in my 40s, he’s in his 50s. We sell different things but we’re both salespeople. We see it in each other. 

“I have a theory,” I say, “about salespeople.” 

“What’s your theory,” he says. He’s having a meal that he eats with the relish of a man told by his doctor not to eat the thing he’s eating. I like him for that. 

“I think,” I say, “we’re good at sales because we grew up in dysfunctional homes. We learn to read people to survive and that’s the real secret of how we get good at what we do. We can read people.” 

He puts down his fork and looks at me with the surprise of someone who had just been read, and then realizes he likes it. I’m saying us. I’ve seen him, and he warms to it. 

“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t say anything else, we don’t exchange details, but we honor the shared experience, what it means to grow up with the question “Who do I need to be not to get hit?”

We don’t get into details, if the parent on the other end of the blows was drunk or high or just hated life. But we both know how to sense emotion coming from another room. You know how dogs can smell a thousand more molecules than we can? Some of us can sense emotions like odors, it’s like we have thousands of nerves devoted to answering that question. 

Who do I need to be right now not to get hit? 

There’s that kid calculus, if I get this right, if I do better, then maybe he’ll be nice to me this time. Working backwards to why that day she was happy and turned on the radio and danced around the kitchen and the rest of the month she was in bed when we got home from school and we had to be very quiet. What did I do on the dancing day? Can I do that again?

It’s a superpower. Selling cable ads in the 90s, I could look at the men who owned the businesses in those little towns and sense what they wanted. They were all men then. Many of them wanted to fuck me, and told me so. It was survival and pride to never flirt, not give them that. Often, they really wanted something else. Some wanted to be challenged. I knew when to be mouthy, smart ass, I knew which ones to push. I knew who wanted to be heard, who needed to hold forth. The ones who wanted to be in their own television commercials, who needed to be small town famous. The ones who once wanted to be something else, a writer or a painter or a musician, and they wanted a chance to be creative. The ones I liked best were the businessmen who liked business the way some people liked pulling apart motors or building bridges, with a stern attention to craft and foundation. 

I’ve worked with many salespeople. The good ones all have that sense of smell, they know how to sense what people want. It doesn’t make you smarmy, or unethical, or slimy. I built a good life for my kids by selling various increments of nothing. I was ethical, responsible, I helped people build their business and careers. 

There’s a kind of beautiful economy, to take the survival skills that got us out of those houses and drove us to drink, or gamble or whatever we did to not feel, and to realize that sense of smell, that refined ability to know who to be, could actually be put to good use. 

I got away from the parent at the other end of the blows. When she died, broke, I had enough money to pay for a nice funeral, the one she wanted. 

I’ve also done lots of therapy to try to learn who I want to be on my own, who I am, and how to be that person without flinching and waiting to get hit. The older I get, the more I know, the less tolerance I have for men who run businesses without attention to craft and foundation. Because I can read people, I can see the ones who want to be PR famous, and I can see the ones who want to build something. Some have paid me money to fix their business and then fired me for telling them truths they don’t want to hear. Others, often women, have let me walk beside them for years as they grow their business, their own paths as leaders, become CEOs, Presidents.  

Many people want to be read, seen, understood. They want to learn how to be different, better, how to learn the craft and foundation of business and build something that matters.

I gambled on leaving advertising and going to grad school. I gambled on starting my own business. Now I’m gambling on telling the truth about my experience and what I know because it might help someone. And because I still love it, that moment when someone like that banker has a start of delight because I see them and understand.