The Art of the Sale: Learning From the Masters About the Business of Life by Philip Delves Broughton

Author:Philip Delves Broughton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Sales & Selling, Business & Economics, General
ISBN: 9781101561744
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

It is four thirty in the morning and I’m running up a hill in Roland Park, one of the ritzier suburbs of Baltimore. Beside me, breathing lightly, bouncing on his toes so effortlessly it’s as if he is being worked by a celestial yo-yo, is a man some call the Termite. Ten minutes earlier, he had rapped on my door to roust me from bed. This is how every day begins for him, whether in frigid winter or humid summer, forty-five minutes up and down the streets of his neighborhood, clearing his mind and preparing himself for the day ahead. “It is important to get my energy right,” he says. As we run, he has a story to tell about every house and street. That’s where the quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens used to live. Over there is a partner at Morgan Stanley. That brick mansion burned down a couple of years ago, killing two teenagers. This street is full of young families and artists. The hardest part of the run is the first five minutes, grinding steeply upward past the brick walls of the Baltimore Country Club. Seeing me wince, the Termite told me: “You do this first thing in the morning and the rest of the day is easy.”

For Guillermo Ramirez—or Memo, as he is known to his family, friends, and many customers—energy is everything. He hews to William James’s advice to make his nervous system his friend instead of his foe, and his habits have served him well, helping him to flatten a world tilted against him. He arrived in America at the age of nineteen with nothing and now owns twelve properties around Baltimore and runs a general contracting business with fifty employees with sales of $8 million a year, even in the darkest days of 2008–9. Each time I mentioned to his friends or customers that I was studying his sales skills, they laughed or rolled their eyes, as if to say, “You’ve got a live one.” He earned his nickname the Termite because once he gets inside a house, he is all but impossible to displace, burrowing through the walls until everything is repaired or upgraded. His energy, recharged on these early-morning runs, propels him through his long days and keeps him alert to the fantasies and weaknesses of everyone he meets. It is the source of his self-efficacy, his belief in his own mastery of life. He believes he controls his own fate.

Motivation has been described as a desire to maximize one’s rewards by attaining a “cognitive mastery of the causal structure of your environment.” You want to know how the world around you works and to control it to your own advantage. It is the kind of desire rarely sought for in tests of ability. But the strength of that desire, that motivation, is what feeds persistence, resilience, and optimism, the coping mechanisms to help you through life’s inevitable defeats. Memo has made a routine of his early-morning run, a superstition even, because he worries that the slightest lapse in control could lead to disaster.

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