Introduction
This narrative essay explains what I learnt when I worked as a senior executive at an estate agency. It explains how I learnt what I can do when I apply myself, which coincidentally is one of the reasons I am retaking my degree as a senior student. Here are the conditions and here is the scenario by which I learnt my life lesson.
Body
During my time at the estate agency, we saw sales figures fall and the management team were starting to become aggravated. Our sales and office manager was dealing with a team of around seven senior estate agency sales people that were seemingly down on their luck.
Only one of them was still making sales and he seemed to have a charm and golden touch that transcended the notion of luck or market forces. Things became very bad and every day we complained about the sales leads we were given. They were from people that had already been solicited so many times that they were tired and regretted every making an enquiry.
After a while, things became so bad that the senior management team sent down an executive from another office. This was a man that was doing very well and didn’t complain about poor leads or bad market conditions. He told us that the company had purchased a new batch of untapped leads that could be made into sales, but he told us we were not getting them.
The senior executive they sent told us that we had to make a sale over the next week or we were all fired. They were looking to replace the staff because the ones on the team at the moment were lame ducks. They also started a scoring system. The person that earned the most during the week got a brand new car; the second most got a new set of steak knives. If you failed to make a sale you were fired.
After a lot of phone calls and a lot of soliciting, I finally got an appointment with a couple that had been solicited a few times. I was told that they just like to talk to sales agents, but I was not going to let that stop me. I went around their house and talked to them until past two in the morning. At this point, I was holding out a pen and waiting for them to sign. After around twenty minutes of silence, they took the pen and signed, therefore agreeing to purchase six units within an apartment complex.
Conclusion
What I learned from this experience is the fact that you make your own luck. We at the office constantly complained about our luck and our leads, and yet when my job was on the line I managed to make the biggest sale I had done all year. It is true that I was motivated in an unseemly and unfair manner, but I learnt that I make my own luck. I now look back on that experience whenever I am feeling under motivated, so that I can remember just how good I can be when I apply myself fully.
