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Pres- read this from the bottom up.  Long story short chick applies for a sales job with the Padres.   She gets denied.   Padres invited her to sales boot camp which costs 500 bucks to attend.   She responds accordingly.  Absolute power move by this applicant, but was it worth being blackballed by every pro sports franchise in the nation? Enjoy


EMAIL FROM THE PADRES INVITING GIRL TO SALES BOOT CAMP

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Jason Green <JGreen@padres.com<mailto:JGreen@padres.com>> wrote

Hi Taylor,

I wanted to reach out to you as you had previously applied for a position here with the Padres to join our Inside Sales Program.  While it may not have been a fit at the time, we appreciate your interest in the position and encourage you to pursue your dream of working in professional sports.

With that being said, I wanted to make sure you are aware of an opportunity to get your start and to pursue a career in sports.  Dr. Bill Sutton, author of Sports Marketing, has asked our organization to host the Sports Sales Combine here at Petco Park on September 14-15.  It will be the first ever West Coast Combine!  As a Combine attendee you would have the opportunity to spend quality time with the hiring managers for multiple teams from different leagues across the country.

Job seekers like you have found this to be the most authentic training and networking experience available. The sales managers who join us claim the Combine is the best recruiting tool for them. Having been to multiple combines myself, and hired numerous people from the events, I could think of NO better way to get a start in the sport industry.  This event could change your whole career.  I know it changed the lives of some of my staff.

Please note that this is NOT a job fair where participants spend a few minutes speaking with prospective employers. Over the two-day event, participants receive high-quality, one-on-one training from attending sales coaches and several unique opportunities to demonstrate their skills in addition to the hours spent with attending managers.  You will have a chance to showcase your sales leadership skills as well.

We anticipate attending sales managers will be looking to fill 50+ jobs at the Combine.  Teams from the MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, MLS and college athletics all use the combine as a key source to find talent for their organizations.  This is your chance to make an impression on ALL of them in one weekend.  Also, what better place to network and learn for a weekend than San Diego, CA?

Taylor, as we look for the best young talent from across the country we wanted to make sure you were aware of the opportunity.  You can find the combine application at Teamwork Online through the link below.  I???ve also included a link to the Sports Sales Combine website.

http://www.sportsalescombine.com/

Combine Description and Application< http://baseballjobs.teamworkonline.com/teamwork/r.cfm?i=46413>

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me should you have any questions about this special event.

All the Best,

Jason

_________________________________________________________________________________

From: Taylor Grey Meyer [mailto:meyer.tg@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2012 11:57 AM
To: Jason Green
Subject: Re: San Diego Padres- Sports Sales Combine!

Hi Jason,

I wanted to thank you for reaching out to me when thinking of ways to meet your quota for the Sports Sales Combine.

After careful review I must decline.  Jason, I realize I may be burning a bridge here, but in the spirit of reciprocity, I would like to extend you a counter-offer to suck my dick.  Clearly, I don’t have one of these, so my offer makes about as much sense as yours.  But for the price you’re charging to attend the event, I’m sure I would have no problem borrowing one.

Managers like you have found this to be the most authentic training available.  Real, hands-on experience getting you on your way to perfecting the techniques you will need to climb the corporate ladder.  In these tough economic times, it’s always good to widen your skill set.

Let’s talk about why I wasn’t a good fit with your organization.  Was it my extensive education that made me less of a fit, that now paying $500 will allow me to overcome?  My graduate work in sports commerce?  Being a law student, working toward becoming an agent?  Was it my past experience overseeing the execution of national and international events?  Wait, I know, maybe it was my previous internship with Major League Soccer, and that I actually got my  start in professional sports at the age of 15 when I volunteered at a minor league ballpark in my hometown.  And given all that, I chose to apply with the Padres, at least 30 times since moving to San Diego.  Persevering through countless anonymous email rejections, I continued to submit my resume despite never even being granted the courtesy of a face-to-face interview.  All for the joy of making $30K a year.  Maybe you’re right.  Maybe I’m not the best fit for your company.  But here’s a nice fit, my foot in your ass.

All the best,

Taylor


So this is going viral today.  I’ve been sent it like 10 times and there are 9 bizillion forwards on it.     I salute this chick.  This email makes  me want to sack Sales guy and replace him with her.    Like any girl who tells somebody to suck their dick is okay in my book.  That works on every level.    And I would 100% write something similar back if this happened to me.  Like only a fucking sales guy could invite somebody they just rejected for a sales job to attend a sales combine for $500.   Just absolutely no conscious.    God bless Taylor Meyer.  She can play for me anyday.


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And yes this email kind of reminds me of my Sales 101 article from back in the day.   Save you’re $500 on the Sales Combine.  This article is all you need to know regarding a career in sales….

SALES 101

I graduated from the University of Michigan with a liberal arts degree and my only marketable skill being that I was a “people person”. Essentially being a people person means that you like sports, woman, drinking and aren’t good at math or science. It was a real killer combination of skills that I knew would have potential employers lining up at my front door to throw wads of cash at me once I hit the job market.

However, much to my surprise, once I graduated from college my phone wasn’t ringing off the hook. It seemed as though my “people skills” weren’t nearly as in demand as I’d been led to believe. It quickly became apparent that the only field, which paid more than minimum wage and seemed to value the skills of the “people person”, was sales. And so without too much thought, I took a job along with a million other guys like me as an inside salesman in the world of high tech sales. Since I didn’t necessarily know what I was getting myself into five years ago, I thought it may be helpful to put together a cheat sheet of 10 things or types of people that all sales guys should prepare themselves to encounter in our world.


SALES 101

I graduated from the University of Michigan with a liberal arts degree and my only marketable skill being that I was a “people person”. Essentially being a people person means that you like sports, woman, drinking and aren’t good at math or science. It was a real killer combination of skills that I knew would have potential employers lining up at my front door to throw wads of cash at me once I hit the job market.

However, much to my surprise, once I graduated from college my phone wasn’t ringing off the hook. It seemed as though my “people skills” weren’t nearly as in demand as I’d been led to believe. It quickly became apparent that the only field, which paid more than minimum wage and seemed to value the skills of the “people person”, was sales. And so without too much thought, I took a job along with a million other guys like me as an inside salesman in the world of high tech sales. Since I didn’t necessarily know what I was getting myself into five years ago, I thought it may be helpful to put together a cheat sheet of 10 things or types of people that all sales guys should prepare themselves to encounter in our world.

1. The Cold Call

Get used to the cold call because that’s all you and your 4-year liberal arts degree is going to be doing for the first two years. Basically, you get the joy of spending 8 hours a day on the horn convincing people who have no desire to talk to you to accept a meeting with an outside salesman. The beauty of being responsible for building somebody else’s pipeline is that you are set up perfectly to be the scapegoat. If your outside salesman doesn’t close your leads, than you are blamed for not finding enough qualified opportunities. If the outside salesman does close your leads then he gets all the credit and all the money even though you did the grunt work. It’s a great system. The best advice that I could give a rookie cold caller would be to make sure that you have a couple sure fire ways to make it seem like you’re making more calls than you really are. For example, my buddy O’harra used to call me 25 times per day and we would engage in 25 fake business conversations. Not only did this get his call numbers up, which they monitored, but my boss was guaranteed to walk by my cube a couple times a day and overhear what he thought to be some very aggressive conversations.

2. The Sales Meeting

Most sales guys get to sit in on at least 1 or 2 sales meeting per week, more if you’re real unlucky. The most important thing to remember with these meetings is to bring lots of coffee to these suckers. I wish I was kidding, but you don’t want to be the guy that falls asleep during these things. Basically, the sales meeting is a cover your ass meeting for upper management. It is upper management’s way to prove to their bosses that they are actually discussing ways to improve performance. Of course, nothing new is discussed at the sales meeting. It is just a review of how your sales pursuits are going, which is totally useless since your boss asks you every ten seconds how things are going. Easily the worst things about these sales meetings is that there are always a couple cowboys who want to impress the boss by asking totally useless questions that extend the agony for hours at a time.

3. The Eager Beaver

Every sales office probably has a few Eager Beavers. These are the guys who seem to legitimately enjoy their job. When you go out for a few pops after work, these guys are still talking about work. They love trying to set up brainstorming meetings to share strategies and tactics to improve their sales skills. They may even recommend a few sales books and are guaranteed to be taking heavy notes during sales training.

4. The Pipeline

The pipeline is one of those great secrets in the sales world that everybody knows about but nobody discusses publicly. The key to sales is having a big pipeline. The more prospects, the better chance for closing sales. It’s pretty logical. However, there is no way to realistically create a big enough pipeline to satisfy upper management’s quota, especially in this economy. The result is that everybody lies about their pipeline during their weekly or monthly meetings. Everywhere across the world of sales, mythical pipelines are filled with fake companies. Now the beauty of the fake pipeline is that your boss knows it is filled with crap, but he would rather hear about the crap than the truth because he has to tell his boss what his pipeline looks like. And so the dance continues right up the food chain, until the entire company’s pipeline is one big joke.

5. The Guy You Know is Full of Crap

I’d say that 1 in every 5 guys in a sales office is full of crap. These are the guys that still talk about the crazy college parties and what a great athlete they were back in the day, both of which you know are lies, but you can’t prove it. I almost feel like these are guys who never were in the popular crowd in high school or college and as a result are still fighting to make it into the “in crowd” and their next battlefield is the office.

6. Upper Management

If you’ve been reading this article closely then you are now probably qualified to be in upper management. Basically, what upper management does is sit around and decide that in order to increase sales, they need more cold calls, more meetings and bigger pipelines. Pure genius. This creates a very peculiar dynamic in which the “leaders” of the company put the future success of the company in the hands of rookie sales guys who are expected to create leads and meetings through cold calling. Hence, this is why the help wanted pages are filled with ads for inside salesman, no experience needed. I always thought that maybe it should be upper management who should create the opportunities in tough times, but apparently not. Keep in mind that upper management really has no clue just how tough cold calling is because they would rather die than try it themselves and most of upper management hasn’t cold called since the 70’s. Therefore, the fact that the economy sucks and nobody wants the product to begin with is generally ignored.

7. The Hot Chick

Sales is a guy’s world. However, most offices will have that one hot chick who stands out like a sore thumb and turns the office on its head. You’d think that this chick is the Queen of England based on how much attention she gets around the office. There are constant rumors floating around about her and whenever you go by her desk you’re guaranteed to find at least two guys making up a reason to talk with her. I’ve always said that if Barstool Sports ever had the money to hire full time sales people, I’d only have hot woman working for me because it’s like stealing for cute sales woman. How is an average slob supposed to compete against a hot female salesperson?

8. CRM

CRM stands for customer relationship management systems. Most sales offices have some sort of CRM system in which sales guys are suppose to input all their sales calls and pipeline information, so upper management can track what is going on. It is my experience that the only thing CRM does is waste time and money. As long as sales guys have to input the information, the information is bound to have lots of mistakes for various reasons. The first and most obvious reason for the mistakes is that we’re going to put whatever the hell you tell us needs to be in there, regardless of whether it’s true or not. You say you need 20 prospects; I’ll give you 20 prospects. You say you need 40 prospects; I’ll give you 40. How do I explain why all these great prospects disappear on the 30th of every month? That’s easy, either my contact got fired, his budget got pulled or they delayed the decision for 2 months. You name it and a top-notch sales guy can come up with an excuse as to why his CRM notes are not accurate.

9. The Take Credit Guy

Only a fool and the take credit guy would say that sales isn’t in large part, luck. Your success depends on your territory, your clients, timing and a whole host of other factors that are beyond your control. However, every office has a guy who loves to take credit for everything. This would be the type of guy who would hit the lottery and explain his methodology for picking the numbers. The best way to deal with these guys is just zone out when they are talking to you. These are the same type of guys who act like sales was their chosen career path as opposed to something they just fell into like everybody else.

10. The Money Guy

The money guys are very closely related to the Take Credit Guys. Predictably all the money guy cares about is money. Not that I don’t care about my paycheck, but these guys are obsessed with it. They love dropping numbers about their commission check, their new car, or whatever else they just bought. The money guy can be part of upper management or just the guy sitting in the cube next to you. Whatever the case may be, the money guy is the guy who honestly believes that he who dies with the most toys win.