TAMARA KEEL: Sales Pitch.

Thing is, I don’t think what I do is sell guns so much as talk about guns. All you have to do is pull my string on the topic and off I go, in positively Aspie-like levels of detail and enthusiasm, on a topic near and dear to my heart. And then people buy the thing about which I am talking.

When I was in sales, one thing I learned was that when a customer told me I was a great salesman, it meant I had lost the sale. If they were enthusiastic about the product, though, it was good. And they were more likely to be enthusiastic about the product if I was enthusiastic about the product.

What I find funny among my law students — and it was far more prevalent among law students at Yale — is the idea that sales is a job that any idiot can do if they can’t get something better. I remember somebody in the dining hall there talking about “selling insurance” as that sort of job, and I pointed out to them that it’s really hard to get people to buy insurance, because it costs money and requires them to think about the prospect of bad things happening. They were surprised.

In Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, she gets a sales job and discovers that it’s really hard, and that she has to get in character like an actor getting up for a part, and suddenly all those sales-training and motivational seminars that always seemed so cheesy to her make sense.

Of course, there are plenty of lousy salespeople out there. I remember car-shopping and driving up to the dealership where several of the salesmen were sitting on folding chairs shooting the breeze. The guy I talked to couldn’t answer basic questions that were answered in the brochures in the rack sitting right behind where they were shooting the breeze. If I had had his job, learning what was in those brochures would have been the very first thing I did.

But any job is easy to do badly. People who think that succeeding — or even just getting by for very long — in sales is easy don’t know what they’re talking about.