When people say to me they’re fed up of salespeople, I wonder who they’re talking about. After all, we are all being sold to every day, every week of every year. Unless you live alone in a cave with only the ravens to feed you. Which, if you’re reading this, proves that fibreoptic cave internet has hugely improved over the last few years.  Or it proves you are not living alone in a cave.

Whether it is social media, standard media or school-gate media, as humans we are attuned to listening to the views, thoughts and ideas of others. We cannot but examine, explore and evaluate what someone else thinks about topics that affect us. Whether it’s fashion, childcare, money, food, travel, leisure, business, work, home, relationships, spirituality or any other timely topics you care about, there is SOMEONE trying to persuade you of their view each day of your life and you cannot escape.

The difference is the exchange mechanism. If you are a parent, the exchange mechanism of children is not money but whining, complaining, arguing, pestering, or harassing until you beg to be released. If (or should I say WHEN) you say ‘Yes, OK then, you CAN have that Star Wars one armed supersoaker with additional pressurised bubble cabin generator’ then the transaction has occurred. The sale is completed and the child has CLOSED the deal. No money has changed hands. In fact at this point, no goods have been transacted. Just a linguistic game of ping pong, resulting in two people somewhat happier than before.

Only somewhat, because material objects cannot buy happiness. However, they represent transactions between people. And it is those transactions between people which makes the world go round, and what really makes people happy.  In the adult world, we represent the transactions as money so we say ‘Money makes the world go round’ . But children know that ‘selling’ or transactional intercourse (I was very careful writing that) is a core part of relationships, and without it, we might as all go and live alone in a cave.

So when I hear complaints about sales and selling, what I take from that is that the complainant is someone who is uncomfortable with someone else trying to make their life better. Which is a shame, because really selling is not about the sales person, it is about the purchaser. The sales person is merely there to facilitate an exchange to bring about improvement in the purchaser’s life. True, some sales methods are less than tasteful, and some approaches are rather too domineering and forceful for most people’s sense of personal space. However, mostly what I see is opportunity presented by the transaction, with the seller acting as the intermediary to bring the opportunity closer to the purchaser. They get thanked in the way we know to be fastest, cleanest and most direct – with money. What is therefore wrong with selling? Nothing at all. In fact I am quite looking forward to the next transactional intercourse I experience!