Southwestern Sales Camp

1997. A bus pulls up on the side of the freeway in Nashville, Tennessee. Four men step out into the dusty hard shoulder and look around them. It did not take long for me to realise I had no idea what the hell I was doing there.

The four of us had travelled down together on a Greyhound bus from New York city, a hideous journey which had taken a full 24 hours. It was the middle of summer, the Greyhound's aircon had broken and its toilet was blocked up, all of which had fermented into a very unpleasant combination. I'd had one book to pass the time - a rather dry guide to writing screenplays - and we'd had just three stops en route for milling around. The bus stations had all looked identical: grey concrete affairs filled with the dregs of American society. Through these halls wandered us four young Cambridge graduates out to make their fortune (or, in my case, out to get drunk and have an adventure).

Heading to Nashvile had felt like the biggest mistake ever. This was my first time in the US and I'd only got to spend a day in New York. Unlike Nashville, Manhattan was beautiful, and full of people who seemed to have their fingers on the pulse. We'd eaten frozen yoghurt and gone to the top of the Empire State Building - a breathtaking view which gave the start of our adventure a magical quality, and which hasn't lost its impact on repeated viewings - and slept in a dorm at Columbia University, less magically in four beds to a room as though we were immigrants fresh off the boat. Two days before that I'd had my graduation ceremony back in Cambridge. My parents smiling in the rain, drinking beers, and crouched in the darkness blasting at my friends' parents with laser guns.

So, we stood in the dust in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. We'd been booked by the Company into the Residence Inn, on the farside of the freeway, and so our Great American Adventure began with us dodging cars across six lanes of traffic, climbing over a fence, rolling through gorse bushes down a grassy embankment and then walking (or hobbling, in the case of the obeser member of our group, who'd we'd picked up at the airport and couldn't seem to shake off) through a remote car park in search of our motel. It turned out we'd been booked eight to a room: two to each of the double beds, and four on the floor. As we'd arrived late we were on the floor by default, so I found a quiet corner beside the fridge and staked out my territory with the single blanket left for my enjoyment. The hotel was very basic, with free lemon squash and popcorn, which comprised my main diet over the week.

I had planned to have a shower, maybe a cocktail and then check out the Waffle House up the road. Jeremy, our leader, had different ideas however. He caught us in the lobby and marched us off to sales camp, the filth of three days' travel still smeared across our faces. We crossed the turnpike and headed up a long, long road to Landers Plaza, the home of the Southwestern Sales School.

There were perhaps 300 other students at sales school, crammed in a rather drab glass and concrete building. We were each handed our bookbag for the season - a cheap turquoise satchel containing five book samples, a credit card machine and various bits of paperwork. The lot weighed an absolute tonne. As we left the room we were also handed a piece of paper, which proved to be our first company invoice. We were charged omething like $250 for the bag and contents, which was indicative of the mindset that made Southwestern their money. In this case, they charged their sales team retail prices on all samples. It was also why I was losing money before I'd even started selling, which made me slightly uneasy.

We were then led into a meeting room where our fellow pupils were being lectured by The Great Mort Utley ... from beyond the grave. Apparently, this motivational speaker was so great he could build just as much rapport when dead (in video form) as he could when alive. I am not a fan of motivational speaking. It is at best drab bullshit, and at worse a manipulative confidence trick. I feel that people taken in by a witty and uplifting story could really be made to believe anything. Alas, this was to be our life for the full five days of sales camp.

The routine was mind-numbing: we woke up at the motel absurdly early, dragged our impossibly expensive and heavy book bags up Atrium Way to Landers Plaza, were lectured for five hours by motivational speakers (some living, some dead), and spent the remaining time practising our sales pitch on each other. Over and over again ("Hi, Mrs Jones, you've probably heard about me. I'm the guy who's going round town spouting out bullshit...") We were taught about opening lines, building rapport, dealing with objections (the first objection, ignore. The second, use a standard line. The third, use a standard line. The fourth, get the hell out of there ... I now always deal with unwanted salesmen by barking four clear objections right at the beginning). All of this was learned off a script which had apparently been written by Charlie Brown in the 1950s. Scripted sayings like "Aw gee whiz, Mrs Jones ..." hardly rolled off my English tongue.

Lunch was served in the expensive canteen, which was again clearly intended to wring every last penny from the student sales force. There was no where else to eat and certainly no time to go to a supermarket in the evenings, and while most other places in the US Iwould feed you like a king for $2, here I could barely afford one slice of cheese and tomato pizza consumed from a plastic plate in the unlit canteen.

In the evenings we had our "execs" - short, I think, for "executive exercises" - which were intended to bond us and build confidence and enthusiasm, but which only left me drained, aloof and miserable. We were also supposed to do these with our team every single morning once we were selling in the field. I couldn't recall the execs in full, but this website thankfully jogged my memory.

Execs were to be conducted every day, first thing in the morning after breakfast and ideally in front of members of the public (say, in the parking lot of a diner or in front of a shopping mall. This was fine at sales school, but in the field it was just Zack and me and we kinda losed enthusiasm). First, someone would spontaneously hold their hand in the air and run around ina circle bellowing "Ohhhhhh!" at the top of their voice. The other salesmen would then join in until the circle is complete, whereupon you can put your arm down and start singing the following song:

It's a great day to be a bookman.
It's a great day I know.
It's a great day to be a bookman everywhere I go.
Goodbye no-nevers, goodbye doubts and fears
It's a great day to be a bookman. Be of good cheer.
I feel happy.
I feel terrific.
I feel GREAT!

Make no mistake - we had to sing this at least four times while clapping our hands and shouting beastly noises inbetween. Someone - presumably sick of this asinine song - would then leap into the centre of the circle and scream, "Now let me see that funky chicken!" Pretending deafness, we would ask him to repeat himself three times. It wouldn't always be a funky chicken, but that one was inexplicably popular. You could ask for anything. After three repeats, the cirle is broken and everyone is left screaming and jumping around pretending to be a funky chicken, or whatever else had been requested.

I hated this. More than that, I hated the people who took inspiration from this.

We were also one time divided up by gender. It later transpired the women were having their 'How Not To Be Raped' talk indoors, while the men were taken outside into the baking heat of the carpark and told to strip to their underpants. We did this without question, knowing that putting up resistance was futile in Sales Camp. We also did it despite the fact the car park was overlooked by residential housing. We were again made to form a circle, and started with a lifetime's worth of Maori war chants. We then had to turn to out right and put our hands around the waist of the person in front of us, and run in a circle chanting that stupid fucking bookman song again.

Ritual and the deferral of pleasure was also central to their lectures to us. We were told of the need to avoid enjoyment and instead do what would make us succesful. Some found this inspirational and declared themselves devotees to the deferral of pleasure, but I found it a disappointment. Who wants to be a success if it means having a rotten time? This may explain why I was not quick to take up the daily routine we were instructed to follow while selling in the field: we were required to get up at one minute to six in the morning, to take a cold shower precisely one minute long, and to leave the house and start selling in the field all day long until nine o'clock in the evening. We were then to phone in our performance figures to Jerry - number of doors knocked on, number of demonstrations performed and number of sales generated in dollars - and retire to bed. This was to be our routine every day except Sundays, which was officially our day off but which in fact we had to spend at a team meeting with our managers, discussing relative progress, awarding the most succesful, conducting longer versions of the daily execs and having one-on-one mentoring, which I suppose amounted to individual brainwashing according to necessity.

Looking back, I'm shocked I didn't walk out during Sales School (actually an obscure memory is telling me now that I did threaten to resign, if I was placed in the field with strangers rather than best friend Zack). The brief research I've undertaken to put together these memories in some semblence of order has identified a number of sites which accuse Southwestern of being a cult. While I think this is putting it a bit strongly, by the end of the Sales School training week I did definitely feel like the only one not to have been brainwashed. Everyone was wholly sold on the idea of sales and on the inante goodness of the company, and no one - not even Zack - would tolerate questions asked about its methods. I have always preferred my own company to that or organised groups, and I have always resisted authority. Those days in Sales School made me realise what it must have been like to be a lone voice of sanity speaking out against the worst excesses of the Nazis in Germany. Another cause of my inability to feel kinship to my fellow salesmen from Cambridge was the name they had assigned themselves: The Dog's Bollocks. Chosen, it seemed, on the mistaken assumption American people didn't know what bollocks were.

There were some fun times in Sales School - most of them spent making the most of a bad situation. I remember I'd stolen a bottle of wine at Trinity May Ball and taken it with us to Nashville, so Zack and I had fun drinking that one evening, although we felt less good about it at six the following morning. We also went to a Waffle House which was an extraorindary introduction to a dreadful American institution, and of course we mocked the people we were training with. In particular, a Chinese girl called Wee-Wee (when she told Zack her name his response was a laugh, and then ask "But seriously, what is your name?") who was serious beyond all measure; a boy and his girlfriend who were opposite ends of the body size spectrum (of whom Zack commented - after hearing them have sex in the bed next to his - "it's like a pencil having sex with an orange"); and a serious and incredibly motivated girl whose eyelashes we imagined to be the size of palm fronds, blowing us down the street as she batted her self-important eyes at us.

At the end of our five days of sales school, we met with our regional leader who assigned The Dogs Bollocks to Pennsylvania, which was subdivided and Zack and I were given our own territory in Carlise. We boarded another Greyhound bus, waved Nashville goodbye for eight weeks and set off north on our summer of adventure.

I didn't really expect to sell anything. I absolutely knew I couldn't keep to the official schedule. I'm not built like that. But, hey, that's a story for another time.

Skip to Part II

[Time: Summer 1997]