The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [83]
I got off, and walked into the first door off the train stop. It happened to be a charter bus company. I walked through the rows of buses in the garage, into the office, and said, “I’d like to talk to the person who hires salespeople.”
And the guy behind the counter said, “We don’t have any salespeople.”
“Well, how do you get customers?” I asked.
“They call us up.”
And I said, perfectly innocently, like it just popped out of my mouth, “So that’s why there are so many busses parked in the garage!”
He was taken aback. He didn’t laugh, for sure. He didn’t like it. But there was something about that comment that rang true.
I said, “OK, how about this. Why don’t you make a list of the ten people you wish would call you up, who have never called. Your dream customers. If I can bring you three of them as customers, will you hire me?”
He laughed, and he said, “Sure.” He wrote down the Chicago Blackhawks, the Board of Education, a ski club, and some other names.
The next day, I called and found out who does field trips for the Board of Education. I took another quarter, went into town, and met with the woman. I told her my sob story. I said, “Please, just one field trip. I don’t care where it is, what it’s for. I just need something.”
She said, “Oh, honey.” She reached over her desk, and handed me a stack of files, which contained field trips for the next year. She gave me orders for every day for literally months to come.
My dad drove me to the Blackhawks office. I used my sob story mercilessly, and I got an order. The ski club was easier. I just talked to someone on the phone, and within a week I had agreements from all three.
I got the job. Seventy-five dollars a week. No commission at first. I was terrified of commission. I just wanted a paycheck. I knew if I got seventy dollars a week, I could live. That’s what I asked for, and he gave me seventy-five.
In the three years I was there as their full-time salesperson, the profit of each single year exceeded the revenues of the owner’s entire ten years in business before I got there. In my last year there, I arranged a deal where I got one dollar for every kid that took a tour I sold to the schools. Had he kept his word, that year I would have made $300,000. This was in the sixties, so that was like $2 million in today’s dollars.
He said, “You don’t really expect me to give you that kind of money, do you?” I think he gave me a $10,000 bonus or something. I was such a wimp then. I was grateful.
When I was ready to leave the company and move on to new things, he begged me to stay. He offered me 51 percent of the company if I would stay. I said no.
Marijo Franklin got married again. Her husband adopted her three children, and with him she had a fourth child—Bryan Franklin. With her finely developed sales skills, she took a job with the Chamber of Commerce, selling memberships. Soon she became one of the top-grossing representatives, among a pool of around eight hundred salespeople. With that record, she decided to walk into the national office. “I introduced myself to the vice president of sales and said, ‘I think the way you’re teaching people how to sell is really wrong, and if you wanted to get everybody to sell more, I could help you with that.” (We need to come up with a female-centric equivalent phrase to “massive balls”. . . Massive ovaries? She’s got ’em!)
She got the job developing the national sales team. This is in the early ’70s, when women just didn’t do that kind of thing in corporations. On her first day on the job, on the executive floor, she asked where the ladies’ room was. There was no ladies’ room. (“We never thought we’d need a ladies’ room on this floor,” someone said to her.)
Marijo went on to hold a number of high-level sales positions, and then in the early eighties became one of the first executive coaches in the nation, pioneering the field. “At that time, when I said I was a ‘coach,’ people said, ‘Oh, what team?’” Most women in daily contact with high-level executives were secretaries; certainly, most executives