IBE the Journey - Part 04

To read from the beginning, click HERE

(Continued from Part 03)
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SALES

It’s all about selling something. It always was. In fact, nothing would have happened if no one had had not sold anything. It’s where all of the fun, the excitement, the competition, the challenge came from. Selling glasses was just like that.

Since we chose to sell glasses, the company’s name became FrostPint Glass Company. According to some calculation of Break Even Point analysis, each one of us FrostPint had to sell at least 12 glasses to be able to even the cost. Number twelve didn’t seem much, but it was not easy to go over. I calculated in my head, “Let see, twelve. If I buy two, my friends hopefully will buy five, and I will have only five left to sell. Easy!” Unfortunately, I was wrong again.

$8 for a glass was too much for any of the international students, especially Vietnamese. (Sometimes occasions like that made me hate how poor we Vietnamese were). My Korean roommate, having his leg injured, wasn’t willing to buy any. Other friends from other countries were just going shopping and bought a lot of clothes and perfumes, so they weren’t helping much neither. My selling career in the beginning was not so pretty at all. One day I came to class, and Levi my teammate told me that I just sold 10 glasses in the previous weekend, for his girlfriend’s grandmother! Another teammate, Jennifer, whose mother was a principle of a school, made most of the teachers there buying some glasses. I was so far behind. I friends were poor, and my families were so far away that they couldn’t help. I was alone, totally.

But I wasn’t giving up. Maybe if there was anything that I had to keep up with others, then it was the fact that I was always trying. I calmed myself down, and new thoughts came to me. “Wait, there is not many international students in the whole class, so I can actually take advantage of this!” I tried the International Office, and my current boss, Suzanne, simply told me, “Sure, I’ll buy one!” And so, I had my very first customer. I got more sales from the other faculties in the office, and in one day, I sold five. It was a great day, and I had new hope in me.

Whoever has hope has everything. It was so true to me. After I sold my first glasses, things only got easier. Cody, my closest friend in UCM, decided to buy one. Dan, another friend of mine, succeeded in selling some PS3 games, bought another one. My roommate DongKyeong was told by the doctor that his leg didn’t need treatment, was happy enough to buy two of my glasses. And that wasn’t the best of it. One day I was told that there were people selling glasses for me, and they wanted four! It was just, “Wow!” I had heard about people who could sell a lot of products, but no one had others helping him selling like I did. I was not only fortunate. I really was blessed.

In the months of October and November, people saw me going to class and cafeteria carrying a white box all the time. Some girls sitting close to me when I was having lunch one day were so curious about the box. “What does he have in there?”; “Is it candy?”… “It’s a UCM glass”, I told them, explaining about IBE and all. It was fun doing marketing sometimes. I kept selling and selling. One time it was twelve glasses at once for a business department! My sales were soon getting over the Break Even Point.

There was some miscalculation among our company, and we were short on inventory. The glasses were nearly out, and we didn’t have enough time to re-order anymore. Many members of the company didn’t sell many. Some of them didn’t even sell any, and they were in trouble. Therefore, any unsold glass needed to be returned to distribute to those who needed more sales and for the pre-sales (got the payment but the products have not been delivered). At that time, I was keeping four glasses, and had already promised to sell two of them. But “already promised” wasn’t “pre-sale”, so I decided to return all four of them to the company, and apologized to my two customers. My first selling career was closed with 34 glasses.

34 wasn’t any outstanding number, since some other members had sold nearly 100 glasses. But more than half of the company sold less than 30 products, and 34 was nearly three times as much as the original number 12. For an international student like me, the result wasn’t bad at all. It would be something worth-telling to my girlfriend, too.

(to be continued...)
Part 05