Try to picture the worst job ever. Okay maybe not the worst job ever, but a job that you wouldn’t imagine being a fun or beneficial way to spend your summer.
Welcome to the land of sales. This is what my job was and will be for the rest of the school year, but bonus! The stereotypes of sales didn’t apply in my particular internship, quite the contrary actually. Working as a Sales Executive intern for The Odyssey at TCU helped me learn how to interact with customers, stay organized with task-related goals and realize my full potential. It was a huge blessing, disguised by the word “sales”.
The number one skill we need in this excruciatingly harsh job market is the ability to work with people. Through working with The Odyssey as a Sales Executive, I was forced to walk up to strangers every day and convince them to do the hardest thing possible: give me their hard-earned money. Everyone knows the sales person that goes store to store filled with memorized statistics and manipulative, artificial “interest” in the success of those businesses prospects. I hate those people. Who doesn’t? But The Odyssey didn’t expect us to be actors. They had minimal training and wanted us to sell the actual benefits rather than exaggerate them. Because of this, I was left without a script; I was expected to just walk into businesses and have real conversations with the owners, rather than listing off a few statistics and handing them a spread sheet with pricing information. After all, couldn't you do that in an email?
In reality, I do want small businesses to succeed. My dad is a small business owner and I know how much pride small business owners have in their accomplishments. I honestly believe my team and I are successfully helping many Fort Worth companies spread awareness of their brands and gain many more customers that are potentially reading this article right now. Learning how to create relationships with strangers, building trust where there is usually doubt and being confident in our product was what we did every day. That experience will be a huge asset for every endeavor in our lives.
Like I said, this internship required organization—a word foreign to me before this summer. I had over 150 clients that I was constantly emailing, calling and visiting throughout the summer; luckily The Odyssey and my Regional Manager helped infinitely with keeping track of my contact points. But in the end, it’s up to us to stay on top of our business. And yes, in a way, this is our business.
What do business owners do? They work all day and sometimes after hours to keep their business running. They keep strong relationships with their clients. They build their business from the ground up, with no prior knowledge of how it will operate or succeed. This is what we did with The Odyssey at TCU. Obviously, we had plenty of help from mentors and the corporate office at The Odyssey, but we were the ones that woke up every day of the summer going in and out of businesses to get enough advertising customers to support the paper financially. We decided how hard we would work and what strategies to use. It took a lot of determination and encouragement, but we did it. Being able to uncover that determination, entitlement and focus to “make it happen” (as our Regional Manager always says) is something we are all really proud of.
The end product has definitely been the most rewarding aspect of this internship so far. By the end product, I do in part mean the first issue of The Odyssey at TCU newspaper being published, but most important was the realization of my full potential. I figured this sales job would be something to add to my resume—which, by the way, it is a huge resume booster. But in the end, being able to talk to a recruiter about the immeasurable knowledge and personal skills I gained through this internship is the best advantage it granted me. My team and I talk about how hard this job was at the start because we were handed the reigns without a lot of training, but we established a foundation by approaching businesses with confidence and friendliness and the rest just seemed to take off from there.
Unfortunately, the sales aspect of a 10% customer acceptance rate still applied here. The rejection was tough, but this Sales Executive internship empowered us to do pretty much anything. Yes, if you accept The Odyssey Sales Executive internship, you will become invincible. But really… Having 15 different people blankly stare at you, ignore you, or say “go away” to you daily takes a toll, but the skills learned and the “Yes”’s make it worth it. That and the paychecks.
