Talkin' Shit About A Pretty Sunset

Amen my sales Brother Amen. I am building a Data center in VA, Salt Lake City, Clevland, and others. I am creating Jobs in all of these areas. Being in sales is the greatest job in the world and if we make some coin on the way go for it. Totally proud of your accomplishment. Iknow how it feels and you are the KING of THE WROLD..... sorry for the titanic reference.
 

Sweet! Congratulations!

Wait. Unless you sell cocaine. You don't sell cocaine, do you?
 

HWCA, Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

redwing,

If so, that would be 360 tons of coke, and I'd be richer than Hank Paulson. I sell an animal feed additive/fertilizer.
 

Great post and congrats.

I, like you, have a ner respect for sales people. I have had to "pitch" my new business to people and basically not be myself for the sake of my company every once in a while.

It's hard work. Doing c-sections is the easy part. Must be like how you feel when you finally get ink on paper for a deal.

Sales as a full time job or a major part of my job would be the death of me. Honestly.
 

"we, in turn, send them tons and tons of heavy, physical stuff packed into shipping containers. Big, dusty, powdery stuff. In a sense, there's not much more to the story than that --- other than the hundreds of hours of traveling, weird cultural stuff, bad food, long bumpy car rides,"

All that must have looked very fragile when oil was trading at $148 per barrel this year!
 

T. Boone,

Yes, yes it was.
 

I agree that without hard-working business people there is no such thing as int'l trade and economic development, but don't discount the role of gov. It sounds like you may have met a couple of DoC people who were not so useful. I know you report what you see, so I will do the same.

Having spent 2 years in a developing country as an econ officer at the embassy, I can report that I saw a whole lot of good work the USG has done to facilitate trade for businesses, small and large. I personally saved small businesses tens of thousands of dollars on authentications alone. You would be surprised how few businesses actually do any due diligence of their own! I mean c'mon, a quick check through the internet will catch a lot of scams. When the scam is more sophisticated, in-country knowledge is golden. Also using knowledge of local culture, business conditions, and political realities, my section helped businesses, conglomerates, partnerships, whatever, navigate their way to successful deals. Two of those deals are worth millions, one probably hundreds of millions. We also negotiated deals between the USG and the host government that called for US companies to come in to do the actual work. I have walked around ports in the tropical sun to see how stuff works, and doesn't work. Those activities weren't even the main part of my job description. DHS has done tons of work to develop the professional capacity of host country customs officials. USAID does a huge amount of work to build trade capacity, not to mention long-term projects on health and education- if your customer can't read how to use your product, results may vary! If your customer is not alive, he might not be the best customer. There was an entire building occupied by USAID people doing great work to help build markets for American products and services. The Foreign Commercial Service hosts trade missions where groups of vendors find new markets and customers. They do an amazing job of putting buyers and sellers together. I saw one FCS officer single-handedly build the chamber of commerce in country that became a conduit for huge amounts of business. The military kept things running from a security point of view and they do great work, too. Etc., etc., I could go on.
 

Anon:

All good points.

Let me clarify though. When I said this: "I'm not even sure the people at the US Commerce Department truly understand what it means in any practical sense." -- I was referring to a meeting I had 2 weeks ago with USCD and they didn't even know that US exporters commonly have exclusive marketing agreements with entire countries --- ie, no one else but one distributor can sell within that entire country. But not to say they don't do good: I actually met with them b/c they have a service to connect people like me to new markets.

Also I said: "When people decide they want to make the world a better place, why do so many choose government or non-profit organizations?" --- My feeling when I wrote that is not that people in gov't or non-p orgs do NOT do good for the world, but that I so rarely find people who go say they wanted to help save the world and choose business as a profession. That is sad.

Often it seems that salesman are portrayed as greedy --- especially lately --- and I was feeling defensive and going on the offensive in a rant/brag.