We bought a TV last night from a wonderful man with the softest sales pitch I’ve ever experienced. This included going to competitor’s web pages to show us their prices, and sharing the actual cost of the TV we were buying. It was a smooth, sincere sounding pitch, from a delightful person.

He gave us a bit of his sales background as we were paying. During that time he said he started his career in car sales but he couldn’t stand it because, “It’s impossible to sell a car without lying.”

He didn’t tell us which car company he worked for. He did mention a couple different ‘big box outlets’ he worked at for over two decades, without saying anything bad about them. And the he shared the name of one he worked for, for just 6 months, that we should never buy from. And of course, now that he knows us, he can share the same kind of deals with our family and friends.

Except for the fact that he was the busiest salesperson on the floor and we had to wait a couple times while he dealt with other customers, the whole experience felt positive… from the first time we talked to him on the phone to when we left the store.

One funny point is that when he was on the phone with us, we thought he was a young, enthusiastic sales person, on his first sales job. We arrived and was told he was in the back with a customer and walked right by him without knowing him. When he found us he said, “Didn’t I tell you to look for the short bald man when we were on the phone?”

He didn’t, and my wife and I had a good chuckle about how mistaken we were about what this man would look liked. But the mistake fed into the appeal, who was this older-than-us man who sounded so genuinely enthusiastic to serve us over the phone? Turned out he was a nice man, working for a good company, with the smoothest, most enjoyable sales pitch I’ve ever heard.

A commissioned sales job is not a job I could ever do, and so I have respect for someone that can do it so well.