Sales is the most Blue-Collar White-Collar Job

Credit: White Collar and Caddyshack

In the summers between my Sophomore and Junior year of college, I worked the most fun job I’ve ever had: a seasonal groundskeeper at a golf course. I did it at two separate golf courses in New Albany, Ohio. Both of these courses had an idyllic vibe. One where all your outside problems went away as you raked and weeded bunkers, placed cups on the green of each hole, fertilized the fairway (but not the green as that prestigious responsibility was reserved for management), mowed the tees, and drove around a golf cart from place-to-place with some fire tunes or an interesting podcast in your ears. 

At each golf course, the most important work is done early in the morning before the majority of golfers arrive for their tee times after 8:30. This was the case for most players, other than this 70-something-year-old man full of energy we’ll call “Earl”. This man was an absolute character who insisted on walking the course, using a fancy push cart to carry his golf bag rather than a golf cart. One morning, at 7:15, Earl snuck up behind me as I was placing a cup on a green and screamed in my ear, “Hit me harder!” before sinking a 10-footer. Despite seeing him at the course daily for the next 2 months, that man never looked at me nor talked to me again, and to this day, I still have no idea what he meant. 

Before I keep daydreaming about my blue-collar job in groundskeeping, let’s talk about sales. Sales, by definition, is the act of persuading someone to purchase a commodity for money or a perfect exchange of goods/services. But in this life, sales goes beyond the scope of convincing people to give you their money. If you’re married or in a relationship, you may need to sell your partner to go on a double-date with your friends when your partner would rather stay in, order takeout, and rewatch Prison Break. When you pull up to the drive-thru a minute after closing at 12:01 am towards the end of a long road trip back to Ohio from Florida–because Ohioans almost never fly to Florida and it makes no rational sense–you have to sell the tired drive-thru employee at the end of a 10-hour shift on letting you order a high-fat meal with a large Diet Coke (so you feel better about your choice of fast food). 

In the words of a career counselor I once spoke to, “Everything starts with sales”. You can run from it, you can hang up on the ticket seller trying to convince you of the value of purchasing season tickets for your local minor-league baseball team when you last attended a game 2 years ago, and you can even hate it. However, you cannot deny sales is an integral function of business and society. Well, you can deny this universal truth if you are a LinkedIn guru with “transformative” ideas that will spark the next revolution in the workforce, but I choose to ignore these “expert” influencers on LinkedIn because most things said from these armchair philosophers are derivative anyways. 

As I underwent a training program from the Dublin, Ohio-based (that’s right I take any opportunity to mention or plug Ohio) Tyson Group at my current position in sports sales, I heard a quote that I will never forget: 

“Sales is an Art. What works for one person, may not work for another person. You have to find your style and what works with you and run with it.” 

For this reason, I believe that because no sales team or salesperson is the same, not everybody can understand the necessity of sales in businesses. 

But unlike other white-collar jobs, like in accounting or website management, sales shares a lot of characteristics with blue-collar jobs. And in some cases, the head of sales at a blue-collar company does their blue-collar job first but wears multiple hats. Just think about your local 4-man painting company where the head of sales is out painting properties everyday but has to be ready to drop their brush in an instant and answer a phone call with paint-ridden hands since they’d rather their phone get stained than lose out on potential business. If you’ll forgive me for that run-on sentence, I’ll break down below a few of the key reasons sales is the most blue-collar white-collar job. 

The hours are not usually fixed or your traditional 9-5

The NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) states that most roadwork in the city is done at night to increase productivity since streets are more occupied during the daytime. In fact, they claim that 2-3 times the normal amount of work can be done during the nighttime. 

Bellevue, Nebraska, on the other hand, only allows building construction noise between 7am-6pm. Not too far from your traditional 9-5, eh? Good for the blokes in Bellevue. 

The point of me bringing up these vastly different cities is that the needs of a blue-collar business to complete the job as efficiently as possible outweigh an unwritten commitment American companies have to ensure your work hours start no earlier than 9 and no later than 5. In construction, this means there are periods you’ll work late hours to ensure airtight contractual deadlines are met on all phases of your team's project.

In sales, your income beyond your base pay is not guaranteed. You will not prosper and make fat stacks unless you find success. There are salesmen that have boundless established clientele and get enough referrals to never have to make a cold call. These salesmen don’t ever have to work beyond 9-5, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if they receive a work email at 7:59 pm from a hot lead, they will probably answer it within 15 minutes. Some may even sneak to the bathroom during a date to do this but I was never a psycho like that. 

New sales reps (usually called “SDR’s”) are encouraged to be “the first one in the office and the last one to leave”. They have to put in more hours to build up their pipeline than more senior employees like Account Executives who have already put the work in to reach an adequate point in their pipeline development. 

In other words, the job description may say you’re in office from 9-5 Monday-Friday, but expect some days to work extra time to develop your pipeline and contact more clients. And if you work in sports sales, expect to work games on weekends and weeknights beyond your normal assigned hours. 

You’ll encounter a diverse set of personalities from clients you serve

My first sales job was in the Wittenberg University Office of Advancement. Sounds cool, right? Well, I wasn’t “advancing” the curriculum, but rather, I would cold-call alumni and request donations from them after they already spent tens of thousands on their education at Wittenberg (or less if they graduated before 1980). 

The first call I ever had, I spoke to a ‘72 graduate of Witt who, after I gave my intro, snapped back and yelled “NEVER CALL THIS NUMBER AGAIN!” and hung up. That woman really “passed her light” onto me, true to Witt’s motto. 

You can expect a lot of prospective clients to instantly reject you and not give you the time of day. On the flip side, you can get lucky and find someone that happens to be ready to buy at the exact time you call them without push back. In sales, that is the definition of serendipity. 

Usually, the client you talk to is somewhere between these two extremes, and you have to info-gather, understand their needs, and build them up to a point where you can realistically pitch them a product or set a meeting.

Along the way, you will get a wide range of personalities. Some personalities are high-maintenance. Some are super chill and never make an issue. Some will “yap” like the Gen-Z Tik-Tokers and you won’t be able to get them off the phone. Some don’t want to talk at all, and being on the phone with you makes them hate their living existence. Some can have a war chest of a budget. Others can have a very minimal budget to work with that only fits within your most economical products. But you have to be adaptive and work with them to see how you can benefit them as a potential client. 

If you work in selling events or entertainment for clients, you aren’t exactly selling something that is a NEED for any given organization or business. However, with the emergence and obsession with “company culture”, that employee who carries your accounting firm may quit to leave for a rival firm because they hate your firm’s mundane culture and their new employer hosts sick events for their employees and takes care of their people. In sports, I have sold groups and packages to law firms, construction companies, youth baseball teams, schools, nonprofits and even groups of friends that wanna go out, crush seven brewski’s and pretend to care about soccer for a night. 

The same goes for blue-collar workers. A singular general construction company could have a contract with a school district, a strip mall, or a billionaire’s 3rd home in West Palm Beach. But to maintain their reputation, general construction project managers have to ensure that all requirements are met and that they are properly prepared to serve any qualified client–even if it is a type of business or industry that they have not before. 

Of course, there are exceptions to this with specialized companies. Medical tech companies probably can’t hit up a law firm and sell them an EKG Machine. Residential construction companies aren’t gonna be repaving highways. 

You’ll endure sometimes overtly blunt/harsh, but necessary criticism/coaching if you aren’t satisfactorily performing the job

I recall my second summer working groundskeeping at the country club, a bomba was dropped on us by groundskeeping management that the sand traps on nine holes all needed to be dug up completely and replaced with new sand. This was just 2 weeks before the largest tournament the club hosted, which had participants such as the club’s board of directors, CEOs at local companies, major donors of the club, and Ohio-based professional golfers. 

Needless to say, chaos ensued, and the job went from peaceful bliss at the sight of clean cuts of greens to backbreaking hell at the hand of sand. 

In our first meeting breaking this spicy update, the Director of Golf Course Maintenance who I will refer to as “Mr. Sir” simply told us the following: “Morning everyone. We have a lot of work to get done before this tournament in 2 weeks, so I expect you all to finish your morning assignments as quickly as possible. As soon as you’re done, come back here, grab a shovel, and head to the bunkers on Hole 7 on the North Course and get digging.” 

After we finished our morning assignments, guess who was the only one who didn’t come to Hole 7 with a shovel? Yup, that was me. You can imagine Mr. Sir was not having it. I am gonna replace certain words in the next interaction since I plan to share this article to my LinkedIn feed. 

“Where’s your shovel Alex?” said Mr. Sir.

“I’m sorry I forgot to bring one,” I nervously responded.

“Oh, I forgot!” Mr. Sir retorted with a decent impersonation of my high-octave voice. “What a lame ass excuse!” 

“Mr. Sir, I’m happy to go back and get one.” 

“No, I’ll tell you what. You take this firetrucking’ shovel and I’ll go get a different one for myself!” 

And from there, Mr. Sir threw me the shovel and stormed off to go on a much-needed break on the golf cart with a sneaky cig back at the shop. 

Was that the nicest way to handle that? Maybe not, but I’ll tell you one thing: I never forgot my shovel again those next two weeks. 

The point of this story (beyond amusing myself) is to show that in blue-collar jobs–and sales–you will likely be subject to harsh feedback. 

This doesn’t mean you’re gonna get cussed out by your manager and cause them to have to go on a smoke break. Rather, it means you will be fed some harsh truths on improving your sales style, flow, prospecting, etc. that you yourself will not see until it is spelled out bluntly for you. 

A manager I had once told me that his manager that trained him when he first started in sports sales would stand next to him for every call. If he asked a close-ended question, his manager would hang up the phone mid-conversation with a potential client and say, “Call them again, say you got disconnected, and don’t ask a close-ended question.” 

In sales, we try to assist our teammates or inferiors as kindly as possible, but sometimes, frankness is required. Even more required than that dinner frank you can’t avoid at Costco with your justification being “$1.50 for a jumbo dog AND a soda is unbeatable in this day and age.” 

The “I’ll fix it” mentality

In the blue-collar world, if a job is not done right, you have to stay to fix it. You will have to fix it even if you are tired, at the end of a long day at the site, or if the job is up to your standards, but maybe not the customer's. 

When I worked that hellish 2-week period for that golf tournament at the club with Mr. Sir and the boys, the sand traps had been up to standard for everyone else but not for those suave CEOs that only hit Titleist Pro V1 golf balls. 

In the final week prior to the tournament starting, the entire team was given the option to work extra hours to help management complete the necessary work to have an immaculate course come tee-off. The prospect of overtime pay and the desire to help Mr. Sir’s face lose a little bit of that tomato-red from all the built-up stress was enough for most of the crew to stay later to finish the job. However, it also came down to the pride of doing the job the right way and ensuring that the tournament attendees who were constantly touted to us left happy. After all, if anyone complained, we knew the rest of that summer would be hell for all of us from Mr. Sir and his associate, Grimace. Okay, that wasn’t his name but he was basically Grimace’s twin. 

The Monday after that tournament, we all came back eager to hear the attendees’ feedback.

After all of the stress, shovels full of sand, and cig breaks from management, the only thing Mr. Sir had to say was something like, “There is a note with the tournament chair thanking you all for your hard work over there on the wall. Feel free to read it.” Man was truly spent. 

With sales, the “I’ll fix it” mentality is well and truly there. Great salesmen will deliver on their promises and ensure the experience with the product or service they sell matches the expectation given to the customer. Especially since the happier the client, the more business that client themselves will bring and/or the more referrals they will provide. 

So if a customer has a complaint about something you sold, you have to step in yourself with the “I”ll fix it” mentality that Sam the Onion Man had in Holes. It doesn’t matter if the client’s grievance was related to something uncontrollable that had nothing to do with you. YOU are going to have to put on your big-boy pants to fix the issue and maintain the client’s trust. It may not be easy. You may have to consult other departments within the company or organization where something was not up-to-par. You may get absolutely shredded by the client and have expletives thrown at you. You may have to work a little late to figure out a way to make it up to the client or solve a potential problem before it happens. Sure, if you can’t figure it out, you still got their money. But do you really want to get referenced by name in an angry Google review or would you rather take some pride in your work and deliver for the client? 

If you have worked a job requiring manual labor in the blue-collar world and are considering a career change, I would honestly encourage looking into a career in sales. Do it in either an industry you love or one you understand well. After all, you can use this article as a recommendation letter.