Life of a Salesman

If you work in the modern megalopolis, you find your poetry wherever you can. If you color hair in a North Robertson salon, I suppose you can think about beauty every day. If you fix cars on Washington Boulevard, you can listen for the prump-prump of a well-adjusted valve. Studio accountants can revel in exquisite, multi-page spreadsheets. Cops can rent “L.A. Confidential.”

But what about salesmen?

In my day job, I sell “technology solutions” to corporations. Often, I find myself dropping into yet another shiny office building in yet another glass-and-steel precinct of the city--downtown high-rises or nameless, sun-baked office parks strung along Jefferson Boulevard. And I can testify that of all the professions in the concrete jungle, we salesmen are most denied a lyric worldview. Just mentioning that someone works in sales is to dismiss him as hopelessly prosaic.

Yes, we have those motivational posters that sales managers give out at company dinners: lions prowling the Serengeti at sunrise, cheetahs stretching their long bodies on the chase, hawks circling fearsomely against stormy clouds. But as metaphors for our work, these images have proven universally stressful and inaccurate. I am not, after all, a predator.

I would like to see new imagery, along with celebratory poetry, for urban salespeople--something with better phrasing than “Hit the ground running.” For starters, there’s an undeniable element of fecundity and a ceremonial quality to our work, like the primitive cult in Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” And like classic verse, every sales meeting must climax in a dramatic “Moment of Truth.” So something agricultural might do the trick, even rendered merely in haiku. Most of our work takes place in air-conditioned offices, so how about . . .

Seeds sown in winter.

Green shoots break through frozen earth:

Our Moment of Truth.

Take a recent Thursday afternoon. One member of our team, with his own kind of poetic diction, tells us that a prospect is “hot,” “primed” and “ready to roll.” He writes up a contract, and three of us don sport coats to converge on one of those soulless commercial zones a few exits past El Monte.

I immediately begin looking for the poetry. I remember how much I enjoy arriving in the sterile, highly lit conference rooms of glittering-clean buildings. I recall how I relish the round of handshakes, the ritual offer of coffee, the scattering of business cards like seed corn across a bright lacquered table.

Once seated, I await that fecund Moment.

Today, however, the temperature is definitely chilly, and we’re getting the Cold Stare from the three Taiwanese engineers who have shown up for the meeting. Their boss has decided, ominously, not to attend. We boot our PowerPoint show, and our man starts talking. Twenty minutes in, he’s still getting the Cold Stare. The contract sleeps in his briefcase. Each time he pauses for a response, all we hear is the whir of the air-conditioning: Talk. Pause. Whir.

At last, our man ventures a direct question, and one of the engineers is forced to reply, in poor English: “I am sorry. We do not understand why our boss continues us to need these products.”

It is the Moment of Truth. Joyfully, I rise. I walk to the white board. And deftly I change the subject: It’s not about products; it’s about process. Ten minutes later, two out of three engineers have cracked a smile.

Green shoots break through frozen earth.

If you haven’t been there, perhaps you consider this a trivial and unpoetic Moment, having little to do with Truth. You doubt if Stravinsky would set it to music. Perhaps you don’t find much beauty in the crisp chinos of the salesmen, or the pastel suits of the saleswomen; not in the awkward small talk or the cheery smiles. And maybe you have a hard time picturing our team as the heroic farmers from my haiku, poised on thawing fields.

But I say we urban salespeople earn both our epic dignity and our fertile bluster. You see, we know that the citizens of the megalopolis undertake very little without the urging of others. Take away salespeople, and natural caution would prevail: Each business would hoard its little stash of money like an icy pond in the center of an overly cooled conference room.

Shiny office buildings would lie fallow.

Winter frost would triumph.

On that trip, we got past some engineers. But on another foray, our little band must meet with the purchasing manager. This is ominous, as we know purchasing managers are immune to changes of subject and clever phrases. Worse, another colleague had trouble with this one in the past.

“You can forget that ‘process’ stuff,” she warns.

“Nevertheless,” I reply as we pull into the lot, “it is this man’s job to purchase things. We are, in fact, his destiny.”

The purchasing manager turns out to be twentysomething, dressed in Melrose layers, with a go-to-hell buzz cut. He has not even arranged for a conference room, and the three of us crowd into his tiny office, where there’s only one extra chair. Buzz Cut remains seated behind his desk doing his e-mail as my colleague, resplendent in her lavender pantsuit, suggests that we go to lunch, where we can be more comfortable. It’s a bad move: Purchasing managers also are immune to expensive lunches. “Just a sec,” he says, not replying to her invitation as he stares at his screen.

At last Buzz Cut stands with a weird grin on his face. “Hello,” he says to me. “You’re new, but your friend here has probably told you I’m a real ass. She’s right. Once we get started, it’ll take you about eight minutes to start hating me.”

Actually, I hate him already. Not only has he set a poisonous tone, but he has violated the sacraments of our agricultural cult. The ceremonial PowerPoint show has been waved aside. He provides no ritual coffee. Poetry has been drained from the room, and the traditionalist in me is deeply offended.

After those eight minutes of brutal negotiation, this meeting’s Moment of Truth arrives absurdly early, as Buzz Cut had planned. Again I step forward. “Look, you know the whole bottom line here,” I say. “We’ll be losing money, but we’ll do it to expand our market share. I’ll just have to convince my boss.” Buzz Cut grins anew. He has humiliated us and now he can give us the contract.

Have we been disgraced? Has this man removed both rhyme and meter from our lives?

No, heading back to the parking lot, we walk again as farmer-heroes, and our minds fill with new and even better metaphors: The barn has burned, but we have raised a new barn. The locusts are gone, and we are picking out the remaining ears of corn. Hail has beaten the heads of our wheat into the black mud, but we have plucked out enough grains to plant a new crop.

Still sharp in our chinos and pastels, we have brought spring to the city once again. Not to mention, of course, that we really won’t be losing any money on the deal. Like I said: In the megalopolis, you find your poetry wherever you can.