Are you done yet?""Don't you own a TV?"
"Your husband needs to get a traveling sales job!"
"Don't you know what causes that?"
"Are they all yours?"
"You must be Catholic or Mormon."
"Wait until they're teenagers."
"Don't you know how much college costs?"
"They have surgical procedures that can stop that, you know?"
These are just some of the responses my wife and I have heard since at least 2004, when we found out we were having our fifth child, and we were in the red state of Texas!
We've since had five more pregnancies—three were miscarriages—and two more daughters!
What does it take to turn a society into being so openly, callously, and utterly against children that the first thing most utter when they hear that someone is blessed with a child is a negative comment?
If I met a gentleman at a networking event and he said he had seven Rolex watches or seven motorcycles—or I met a woman who said she had seven dogs or seven laptop computers—and I said, "What are you thinking? Are they all yours? You must be Protestant or Jewish!" how do you think I'd be received? (Picture Trump walking into a Biden rally.)
Marriage is a good thing. Ask Zig Ziglar.
Children are a good thing both from a religious perspective (read Psalms 127) and an economic perspective (read the U.N. warning on declining populations.)
What does this have to do with sales and marketing?
On the one hand, not a dang thing. I just felt like venting.
On the other hand, it has everything to do with sales and marketing insofar as:
- Without humans to whom you can market your wares, you have no business, so be happy for large families. (Like I told my cousin a couple of years ago, when The Schaeffer 9 show up at your restaurant or place of business, even if we redeem coupons, we increase your sales for that day! So much more when we bring the grandparents, son & daughter in law, cousins, aunts and uncles, friends, girlfriends, and boyfriends!)
- When you are interacting with others, you must possess "situational awareness," a phrase I learned in the Air Force, which means to pull your head out of your iPhone and know what is going on around you! When you blurt out stupid, repetitive, expected, insensitive comments to someone you just met, you have no way of knowing if you are insulting the CEO of the company you've been targeting for years—and you'll now be locked out for another lifetime because you violated Deadly Sin of Selling #3.
Remember the motto of the Jacobs brothers, Life is Good.
Celebrate life.
Without it, how would you make your quota?
Speaking of quota, how are your sales this month?
Need some help?
Market like you mean it.
Now go sell something.
