On Topic: Bitten by the sales bug

Pete had two big passions in his life - gambling and sales.

OK, make that three big passions - gambling, sales and, well, more gambling.

I suspect that to him gambling, his avocation, and sales, his vocation for his entire professional life, were the same thing.

Pete bet on anything and everything - the horses, dog races, professional football, college football, high school football, the toss of a coin, your weight, the color of the next car that went by ….

Maybe both activities - sales and gambling - gave him the same rush. Certainly where he plied his trade had a lot to do with this mixing of work and play.

Pete drove around to stores we used to call newsstands, though newspapers and magazines never were these establishments' No. 1 movers. They were in the business of selling cigarettes, cigars, candy and chewing gum, and invariably had a sideline locally known as “playing the bug.”

You know, as in, “Hey, Arnie, give me 20 bucks on the bug tonight.”

Pete's livelihood was to take orders and make deliveries on front-counter merchandise - the cigars, candy and gum, plus whatever seasonal novelty geegaws he could talk the store managers into buying. Around Easter time Pete's car would be packed with gigantic chocolate rabbits, assortments in heart-shaped boxes in early February, tiny chocolate Santas-on-a-sticks for December - you get the idea.

Pete was a born salesman, if there ever were such a creature. He never met a potential customer he didn't like.

He was Arthur Miller's Willie Loman, but in a happy way: the perpetual goofy grin and off-kilter eyeglasses, a slap on the back and a ready joke that tended toward the “Did you hear the one about the guy who came home late one night and forgot his keys?” mode.

When he was in gear, he hardly paused for breath: “How ya doin' there? Lemme show ya what I just got in today, and I thought of you because you're gonna love this.”

And he did all this without much in the way of leads and undoubtedly no online customer list. His database was his memory, where he filed away his clients' spouse's first name and where their children attended school. (If he didn't remember, he once told me, he bluffed.)

He went storefront to storefront, armed with a smile, a handshake and a small order book.

Pete and my father had been friends since they were teenagers. Pete was bit older and, more important, he had a car.

Even when they started out together as young men working in a big department store in downtown Youngstown, Ohio, Pete liked to devote a good chunk of his earnings to horses and just about anything else that moved, on four legs or two.

After he got married, he'd face a dilemma when he won big.

He'd want to share his joy and good fortune with his wife, but generally would be met with a frying pan. (Did you hear the one about the guy who won a bunch a money playing the bug, but had to hide it from his wife …?)

Pete maintained a chunk of his client list up until he died, in his early 90s.

His pace had been slowed a bit by age and by an accident related to his other passion. A few years before he had been grazed by a truck, injuring his leg, just outside - and I'm not making this up - a casino.

I was thinking of Pete and his sales panache as I looked through Julie Hansen's book, “Act Like a Sales Pro” (Career Press, 2011). The author, head of a sales consulting company, former national-magazine sales director and an actor - she's been on “Sex and the City” and TV commercials - advances the notion that sales folk can improve their closing ratio by adopting some acting skills.

For example, Hansen suggests sales professionals consider imagining “the moment before” when about to make a call. An accomplished actor, she writes, “must select an imaginary experience … prior to her entrance that will provide her with the necessary momentum to jump into a scene already in progress.”

The connection to sales? “By selecting and focusing on the right ‘Moment Before' for our sales calls, we can achieve an optimal state of being despite the unpredictability of life.”

That is, the sales person can come into the appointment with energy and focus, as Hansen notes - rather than relying on whatever mood in which the potential client might be entrenched.

Pete, as someone who always entered any room with his own head of steam, would have loved that. He'd imagine his next big win - at the track or with his next customer - then adjust his smile and barrel ahead.

“Did ya hear the one about the guy who …?”