If Alexander Graham Bell Was A Hermit
by Brad Roteman
I recently sat in a meeting where a participant stated that he believed the most important aspect to a business was the back office support. I was amazed to hear a seasoned professional state this and was reminded of a similar situation in my life when the importance of sales was unrecognized. I would like to share that experience with you.
When my son was a sophomore in high school he sat down for dinner one evening to announce that he no longer had any respect for me. His history teacher had told the class that all sales people were self serving tellers of lies and could never be trusted. Having spent all of my adult life in sales, one might understand that this angered me enough to have my son leave the dinner table to wait for me to calm down enough to discuss the matter with him in a level-headed manner. Two hours later I told him the following story:
Imagine that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in a cave on a mountain in Colorado, not in New York City. Imagine, further, that he ran a telephone line across two mountains to his nearest neighbor’s cave. Then, with the line working well, these two hermits spent the next twenty years having telephone conversations every day about their health, the weather, the animals they saw, etc. And then Bell died, leaving no one else alive knowing about this invention of his. What a different world we would be living in today!
Think of it! Imagine a world without telephones, faxes, emails, and their impact on commerce, trade, sales, daily living, choices on where we live, our health and so much more. That world would l be so very different from the world in which we live today.
Why did the telephone change the world? It changed because Bell sold people on his invention! Even the electric light would have been a fleeting flash in the darkness if Thomas Edison had not turned from inventor to sales person. Sales drives everything! Every idea needs a sales effort to transform it from idea to useful tool of humanity. Someone has to demonstrate perceived value to get product into people’s hands. Nothing comes from nothing in life, and something remains merely a thing until a sales person transforms it into a thing people want and will pay to own or use.
My son learned his lesson well. He has had a highly successful sales career. Today he is one of the top sales professionals in the telecommunications industry, bringing innovative internet products and services to the marketplace. He is helping to change the world we live in and his father is justifiably proud.
