Outsight of the Month

The Unacceptable Face of Selling.

Chuggers.

The only breed of people that makes me really lose it.

They are bright, clean cut, insistent and cocky.

I hate their mercenary certainty and, irrationally, I begin to loathe the organisations they claim to represent.

They make me completely grumpy and vitriolic so I say things like “but cancer isn’t all bad” or “how can you befriend the earth and don’t you think Jeremy Clarkson might be right?” or, worse still, “just go away!” This isn’t genial me speaking – it’s chuggerosis I’m suffering from.

I don’t like being bullied and harassed. I do not like these salesmen. As Dr Seuss put it in my second favourite poem (Ode to a Nightingale is first) “I do not like them Sam I am.”

Yet my life has been in or on the fringe of sales. Sales is the lifeblood of the economy. In the USA where they take selling much more seriously 9% of the population are involved in sales and the annual spend on sales staff and sales collateral is said to be $500 billion.

It’s just that relationship building, which is the way I always saw selling, and the chuggers are a mile apart. They share with Allied Dunbar a kind of patronising aggression you see in the more extreme evangelical churches. But they are worse because they are hired for their “gab” the gift of which they fluently display.

Next time you see one try beaming beatifically and say “can I tell you all about Jesus?” Alternatively say “have you thought about double glazing – it’s the now thing to do?”

Hopefully they’ll chugger off.