The words make the hairs on the back of their neck stand with excitement, while at the same time they say the words that make the hairs on YOUR neck stand – “how do I pay you?”

There’s no rush quite like it. The rush of knowing you convinced another human to make a decision. Better yet, a decision involving you and getting paid. It’s like skydiving while standing on the ground.

There’s not a salesman alive that will tell you there’s a bigger high then landing a whale account or closing “the big one”. We salesmen eat, sleep, breathe, study and push our products with a passion.

When someone recognises our value and buys our shit we get higher than giraffe pussy.

But let me get serious for once on here.

Many salesmen don’t close as many sales as they want. Hell, who am I kidding? No salesman is ever doing as good as he wants to do. This leads to other problems. The problem is that we still search for that high. Even when we are not closing for it.

We get addicted to the high. We crave it and there isn’t anything else on this planet that compares to it. Yet we try to duplicate it with drugs, alcohol and adrenaline fixes. It seems that once you see the other side, you don’t want to go back.

It’s this precise reason that salesmen are known for being drunken, drug induced snake oil salesmen. The world knows we get high but they don’t know why. They don’t know the crazy anxiety that comes from not having security in the form of a steady paycheck.

I’ve suffered

I don’t personally do drugs any more. It’s been over 10 years since my last “binge”. I don’t take pills, shoot or snort shit. I am still known to partake in the reefer from time to time to relax though. Even though

I may not do drugs but I DO drink and smoke. I don’t judge any of the salesmen who do use drugs. I feel bad for them but I’m empathetic because I understand the sales addiction.

I’ve seen it happen too many times. They rush of the drugs will eventually outweigh the rush of closing a sale. It’s when a person gets to that level that they will never be the same. They’ve got a new high that will never serve them correctly.

It’s a level up issue. They can’t naturally take the joy of winning at work so they sabotage it with drugs to mask the feeling with drugs. It’s easier to use the drug high as an excuse to feel good than the sales high that’s natural. Another sad part about sales is a lot of sales dudes lie. This causes deep internal struggles which leads to drugs to mask the pain too.

It’s one thing to have a killer month at work and celebrate at the strip club with hookers and blow but it’s another to spend a Monday night locked in your house skitzing your fucking balls off.

So how as leaders and managers can we begin to keep more of our kind off of drugs? I’ve got a few ways we can get started taking our community in the right direction.

First: Don’t do drugs. If you’re looked at as the leader, it’s your job to make the hard decisions and do the hard things. People respect motherfuckers with control.

Second: Incentivise those you serve. If you’re a sales manager or leader you need to set goals and standards that are hard enough for your team to hit that their focus is on the goal not partying. Leave them with no time to kick it.

Third: Call motherfuckers out. I was leaving the club a couple weeks ago and one of the guys in the car called his dealer, I was like “bitch, we had three drinks and you’re broke as fuck WTF are you trying to get high for? That’s straight loser shit man and it’s sad” you should have seen his face. I was called an asshole but I felt good about it.

Like I said, I don’t judge but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my fellow man fall into the dark on my watch. I go out a lot and am very active, it’s because of this that I see a lot of things others don’t. I view my job as a leader to set an example.

Maybe it’s time you start helping the community too instead of hooking them up and partaking.