Tuesday 27th March (Day 26)
Today was
another day of work, the morning started off okay but Joanna my boss showed up
in the afternoon. She wanted me to pitch
her to see how my pitch was developing and to find out why I hadn’t managed to signed
anyone up yet. It is always hard to act
natural whilst you are pitching some you know who is pretending to be a “normal
person”. It is even harder when you know
that person will be judging you on everything from body language to every word
that comes out of your mouth.
I generally
did the pitch well this time but I came apart when it came to the close and
concern handling. The concern handling
is basically when the person you are pitching says they can’t signup and you
have to try and convince them otherwise.
I absolutely hate doing this which is why I am terrible at doing it. I just feel like I am twisting there arm into
doing something they don’t want to do. I
see myself as a generally light easy going guy and making people do things they
don’t want to do is just not in my personality at all.
Joanna said
overall my pitch was good and I was improving very well, but she also said that
if I finished today with no signups I should drop by the office after work with
all my stuff (charity tee-shirt, paper work, clipboard and ID badge). Basically it sounded like if I didn’t get any
signups I was going to get fired.
In fairness
Joanna is a very nice woman but as my boss she is target driven and I felt like
I was not performing as she wanted.
After a few
hours of hard work I managed to speak to a fair number of people but again no
sign ups. By this point Mina was working
with me to try and get a sign up for me but this didn’t really help. I stopped for a second to watch her work and
that girl is just a little fundraising machine.
There is nothing special about her as such; she is so short that most
people probably don’t even notice her at first.
But she is such a machine; she never stops talking to people. She is constantly going from one person to
the next. Another one of her great
abilities is her ability to isolate someone from a crowd. Usually when people are on their own and they
see fundraisers they walk closely to groups of other people they don’t know in
order to hide. But this doesn’t work
with Mina. Her ability to pluck people
from crowds is just awesome.
With the
words from Joanna ringing in my head and seeing busy body Mina work the only
way she knows (at all capacity) I realized something. I was shit at this job. It was like I almost woke up, I am an
engineer not a fundraiser. I can’t do
this. I approached Mina and told her
that I had decided that fundraising wasn’t for me.
She was very
nice and said that she was sorry to see me go and that I had been a pleasure to
work with. She also said I had a lot of
potential to be a great fundraiser. I
told her that I thought I had potential, but there are other people who will
pick up this job and become better at it faster than me.
I just sat
down and took of my charity tee-shirt. Overall
I felt terrible; I have failed. I
thought I could do this but the truth is; I can’t.
I had to go
back to the office to hand in my stuff and to have an “exit interview”. Overall the exit interview was actually quite
good. The woman I spoke to was very nice
and she just asked me a few questions.
One of the questions she asked me was what could the company do
better? I said that I felt underprepared
when I went out on the streets and that 2 trainings days would have been a lot
better. She agreed with me and said that
a lot of people had said that. This made
me feel slightly better.
On the walk
home I was thinking about all the engineering jobs I was going to apply
for. I was excited about the idea of
getting back into engineering, but then something happened. Something that changed everything...
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