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| How to High Five Diagram via Wired |
Mostly my company communicates by using a series of alpha-numerical abbreviations of the kind most often seen in a lazy teen’s text. Today, for instance, was Q4 s4s M/SA training. Essentially a corporate version of “U R 2 dum 2 sell stuff”, this fourth quarter “Selling for Success” session meant I’d have to dedicate five whole hours of my life to our basement (a.k.a. “company conference room) with its spores, lung crushing fungal odor, and John, our wide-eyed British trainer who insists upon wearing an ill fitting checkered shirt tucked into a pair of wrinkle-proof five pocket khaki pants. He prances, purses his lips, rolls his eyes, and guffaws in such an exaggerated way I’ve been caught staring hard at his back trying to find his battery pack. He is 40 years old.
I’m not sure exactly what went down since I zoned out a few times, but I do know that we spent a good hour or so role-playing certain sales situations. I spent the majority of this time reeling in disbelief. One particular exercise had us look at four different pictures of four different people. We were supposed to come up with ice breaker lines that we could ask them upon entering the store. This supposedly led to conversation (or “customer engagement”), product demo-ing, and (theoretically speaking) a fatty sale. One picture was of an older woman wearing a bless-her-heart pastel tent dress and clutching—in a vacant zomboid manner—a wilted daisy. I looked desperately at my coworkers trying to solicit an eye roll or suppressed giggle/cough worthy of such an image but all I saw were ten complacent heads bobbing on ten complacent necks. I heard phrases like, “Oh my! What a lovely blouse, where did you get it, my grandmother got me one just like it, looks like we’re twins!” as an example of a sufficient ice breaker.
During the three hours leading up to our lunch break I heard people scream “BONUS!” and slap fives not once, not twice, but six times. If they weren’t shouting “BONUS!” and high-fiving they were saying, “We do this, sell that, be this, force smiles to GET BONUS!!!” I have never felt so corporate in my life, not even when I was selling knives to lonely housewives and racking up plaques at an actual pump-up-the-sales-team district conference.
The sad part was that towards the end of the three hour stretch, when I was nearly overcome with the desire to inhale the three pizzas that were innocently sitting on the table waiting for the lunch break, I started getting really into it. At first I’d throw out the Captain Obvious no brainers. But with lunch so close I could taste it, I became Sally Sales Associate. I demo’d as though I was being secret shopped by the CEO himself, I smiled brightly, tossed my hair, and made my eyes twinkle appealingly. I even—and I could kill myself for doing this—high fived and yelled “BONUS!” This was done so realistically and vigorously that I actually found myself high-fiving with my manager. That was when I realized that I was willing to do literally anything for a free lunch.
On that note, if anyone has tales of rock bottom or what you did to get a free lunch, I would love to hear. Mostly to put me out of my personally designed corporate hell :)
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