Ayn Rand and Atlas the Lying Bastard

From The Testosterone Pit A Book about Selling.

---Possibly only Karen in payroll knew his real name. He’d been a roughneck and had made tons of money, but during the oil bust, he’d lost his job, and for a couple of years he’d tried to find something else in the oil business, but the oil business had moved to Houston, and no one needed roughnecks like him in Houston, so he stayed put and climbed down the ladder. Still, he couldn’t find anything, as all the other jobs had disappeared at the same time.

He lost his house and his boat and went bankrupt and got divorced, and all he had left were child support obligations, a garnishment on his paycheck, coarse hands, a red leathery neck, and fond memories of drilling rigs. But he’d become an adequate salesman, and he loved Logo because he’d introduced him to Ferronickel, and he loved Ferronickel because he’d given him a chance.

Millikin had gone into a closing booth to hammer Mr. Taylor. Angie Grinder, the salesman on the deal, was loitering nearby. She was praying. Ferronickel, who watched from the Tower, was praying too. Because every fucking deal counted. When it came to selling, they were all religious.

Angie was the quintessential dingbat. She was dressed in a long flowing skirt, embroidered vest, and wooden jewelry. She used to be the office runner, the low end of the back-office pecking order. After hearing stories about the money being made in sales, she considered becoming a salesman.
But the long hours were a handicap. Some salesmen never sold enough to make above minimum wage, and after a few weeks on minimum wage, they were fired for not selling enough. And she abhorred the idea of spending half her life out on the lot in the brutal summer heat or in the miserable winter cold.

No, she preferred her predictable eight-hour workday and her wage, which was a buck above minimum. One afternoon, out of idle curiosity, she asked Karen in payroll how much the best salesman made in a good month.

“Massacre?” Karen said. “Somewhere in the low gazillions.”

“No, really.”

Karen clicked through a few screens. “Okay, last month for example.” She had Angie come around the desk and look at the monitor, at a number she tapped at with her pen: $16,546.

“That’s more than I make a year!” Angie gasped. “A lot more.” And she thought about Lucas, who’d turned four, and how for her, a single mom, every little thing was a struggle.

“I know it’s not fair,” Karen said.

But Angie didn’t hear her anymore. She was already at the Tower, breathless and feverish. “I want to sell cars,” she told Ferronickel.

In her first month, she sold twelve units and tripled her pay and tasted greed, and it was sticky sweet and intoxicating. In her seventh month, Angie Grinder sold twenty units, the sound barrier in the car business that most salesmen could never break, and people were impressed and called her Meat Grinder out of respect. And she hadn’t been able to get anywhere near twenty units since.-----

*****

In 1992, I attended a sales seminar on mortgage origination and closing. I was convinced by Tim, the owner of the mortgage business, that I should give it shot. We had met through mutual friends and had white water rafted once. When I was done with the seminar, I worked for one summer pushing re-fis on people. Those three months gave me my first introduction to the atmosphere at a sales office.

In all honesty, I wasn't gung-ho about it. I was bored with my current job and drifted into this to see whether it had more fun. It was like Dim Sum, I tried a little of this, a little of that and see what I liked. As the weeks went by I found myself becoming more and more desirous to succeed.

The leads we generated ourselves. Every mortgaged home, in every city, is recorded at the City Hall and is public information. I'd go down with one of the other guys with a laser hand scanner in my pocket to get this data. I'd flip through property books and slide that weird green light across leaf after leaf of juicy information. Once back at the office, I'd download that information into the computers and print it out. Then came a good half day's work of finding those loans with high interest rates. These were the people we were after. Hopefully, they weren't bad credit risks and had these higher rates due to being screwed by the bank who sold them this overpriced mortgage first off.

Then you'd call them up. Your likely success at selling was 1 in 50. The payoff wasn't bad as you were selling $100k, $200k or say $400k worth of a product with a 1% commission. 1% of $100,000 is $1,000. Not bad if you can routinely sell enough in a month.

When I first started this, I was very honest, not particularly hawkish nor driven to push these people into signing that day. To add to this, Tim the co-owner, didn't lean on me to “sell, sell, sell” either as he was fairly laid back.

I began to watch the other sales people and managers in the office. They were hopped up nearly all day on too much coffee and constantly talked of money or the last “kill” they managed to bag. This talk of making a couple of grand in a day started make my mouth water. As I contacted more and more leads, I started bending the truth harder and harder. I would ask about their life situation. Were they married? Single? Did they have kids? This information gave me a way to wheedle into their brain with the right tactics.

I was becoming a scumbag quick.

My first sale shocked me in a way. I never sold $200,000 worth of anything to anyone in my life. But there it was, the paperwork to give to Tim for the final kill. It took a month to process the new mortgage through and one day Tim comes to me and says, “Here you go kid, you busted your cherry...it's a check for $2,400...I managed to eek a bit more out of them.”

I was elated. This money alone was enough to make me more of a lying, manipulating prick to get that second sale.

It took several days more of digging up records, calling and getting blown off by many people until I scored another. It was for $120,000 but that would translate into a $1,200 check. However, when the loan was processed, the commission check was for $700.

“What happened? I asked Dan, who was the other co-owner and closed this particular deal.

“Oh, we ran into problems. They're credit wasn't really that great and I could only get them a loan for less.”

“Do you have the paperwork? I ask. I'm now becoming very suspicious about it.

“Oh, it's not here...it's in my car..and it's in the shop today.” Great I think, a nice lame excuse.

I couldn't prove it, but this sales manager fucked me out of part of the commission I was owed. I was told about these tricks by other guys in the office who were similarly screwed by other sales managers in the past.

A sales guy who I became friendly with tells me

“In the sales field, a lot of sales managers think, because they've arrived and are managers, they're entitled to a piece of your commission. It's a lot more common than you think. It's sort of an unwritten law. And if you bitch too much and are not the top salesman in numbers, you'll become very uncomfortable working there.”

I quit by the end of the week.

I took this job as a lark and I found it lucrative and dangerous. The idea of someone else dipping their beak into my hard work, didn't suit me at all and I was OUT.

A few years later, I found out the two co-owners had a rout. The sleazy one had taken all his customers, the people in the office loyal to him to a new operation he had started on the sly a few months before. Tim, the guy I knew, was pissed to no end that his business associate had back stabbed him.

Tim's business was so wounded that he had to eventually close it down and go back to working for the banks in downtown Providence, where he had started in his 20's.

That's the dog eat dog world.  That's the way the game is played. Everyone is in it for themselves and they play this game with a blatant, yet cunning selfishness. Under their Brookes Brother's suits, I'm sure they wear tee shirts that tell the reader, “No Prisoners: Meaning YOU!”