When I was a freshman in high school, I went over to one of my best friend’s houses to watch a new movie that had just came out. My parents weren’t keen on me watching overtly vulgar and raunchy films, so we made the deal that we would all watch this new movie that we had been dying to see together at my friend’s house. The film? A Martin Scorcese biopic/dramatization of corrupt and infamous stockbroker Jordan Belfort: The Wolf of Wall Street. I was hypnotized by the film, all the riches and glory and the extraordinary amount of “screw-it” that Belfort had towards life and those who were against him. I told myself that I wanted to be just like him (minus the heavy drug usage, infidelity, and fraud, among other things). After my first watch, I began to research the man Jordan Belfort actually was and only became more tantalized. So, from my sophomore year in high school, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in investment banking.
My idolization of Belfort took me to many places that I never thought I would go in trying to learn how to effectively sell to a customer. Turns out, Belfort was one of the most brilliant minds that the business world had ever seen. He had broken down the game of sales into a science, with a passion that was almost religious being the driving force behind it. In his book, The Way of the Wolf, Belfort made an effort to not only outline the reasons that people want to buy things, but the complete human psyche. Reading this book gave me a completely different approach for how I wanted to become successful in the business world.
I now realize that in order to effectively sell something, you have to know the person that you are selling to on the most intimate of levels. You must know their desires, their dislikes, their insecurities, and the things that they hold dearest in life. Knowing all of these factors means that you can steer a conversation into a solution that benefits both parties, offering you the opportunity to make money to support your family and yourself and in exchange, giving the customer a product or service that equally enhances their life. This “get to know you” process can happen in a matter of seconds, all based upon a person’s response to two or three questions. If you can learn to read people and know how to break a sale down to a basic conversation between two people rather than a business exchange between company X and company Y, then you will be very successful.
In conclusion, the last two years of my life have seen an increasing interest in the place of psychology within the business world, namely sales. As I prepare to enter the career field, it is my goal to learn all that I can about the human mind in conjunction with the way the business world works so that I can not only be successful at selling items, but also be successful in selling items that bring a positive influence and joy into the lives of those that I do business with.
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