On a weekend out to rearrange my furniture, I met 'the real thing' in an unexpected place. What stopped me in my tracks as I passed through the appliance section at Electro Mart (a Korean electronics retailer) was a sales clerk selling coffee machines with a polished way with words.
She looked about my mother's age, and she was a pro. She listened closely to the customer and, in the gaps, slipped in the right solution and the product's differentiators. The person in front of her seemed hesitant but got drawn in little by little, and in the end, bought.
I found myself wanting to be "taken in" by that sales pitch too.
The moment I stepped up to the counter, she handed me a delicious cup of coffee. Then she got me imagining how this machine would contribute to my weekend rest and productivity. She wasn't talking about a mere machine. She was talking about "a wonderful time."
The offer was different too. She opened a standard box and put together a custom package just for me, then handed me a recipe document she'd written up herself and her personal contact for aftercare.
Of course I paid. No, I had to.
This wasn't some disrespectful feeling like pity projected onto a mother figure.
It was respect for a professional who had pushed through tens of thousands of rejections and brush-offs on the battlefield of in-store sales and made selling, in her own style, part of her daily life.
I was glad to pay for that overwhelming experience.
Every so often I meet people like this.
Not the theories floating around on LinkedIn or Threads, but people who learned sales in their bones, in the realm of survival.
You can't beat these people.
You just enjoy the experience of their world and come home.
*The grandpa who built and sold PCs with a 99-degree manner temperature on Karrot (Korea's neighborhood marketplace app), the interpreter I met in Tokyo who could run circles around any GTM manager, the yoga studio owner in a provincial town with 20 years of experience, and so on.. In front of people like these, don't get cocky.
