What I Learned Selling Campground Memberships
It will work for you too.
The road into the campground went right by the building where we worked. There was an outer room where visitors entered for their appointment to see one of us.
A phone sales team had called them and set the appointment. They had come to learn about owning a campground membership.
We were on a number system. “You’re next” was the call to put down whatever we were doing to distract ourselves. It was our turn to sell the prospect, usually a couple, the value of belonging.
It was 2001. Del and I had moved to Ohio briefly to see his family, but I needed to work in the meantime. Years before, I had decided that I would always have a job if I knew how to sell. That turned out to be true in this case. I was hired the day I applied.
While we waited for our turn to talk to a prospect, the rest of the sales team gossiped, smoked, or tried to get a few moments of sleep.
I was busy on my computer. I had almost finished my book Living In Grace, and I was teaching myself how to code the websites I wanted to have.
This passion for what I was doing kept me from going crazy in that back room. I also usually enjoyed talking to the people assigned to me.
After an initial "hello,” I would lead my prospects to the car I had bought just for that job. It was a CRV with four-wheel drive. It was necessary because, in the winter, I would drive through banks of snow to get to the cabins that I showed the potential buyers.
Back in the big salesroom, I would pitch the deal.
The manager sat in a room off to the side. He rarely talked to anyone but would listen to our pitches. One day, he and the assistant manager called me into the office.
“You get pretty friendly with all those people, don’t you?” he asked.
“Sure! I enjoy talking to them.”
“Well, I can see you have a good record here, and you do well, but there is one thing wrong.”
I remember thinking, “Who cares? This is temporary.”
But what he told me has stayed with me.
He said, “Sell only one thing at a time.”
He explained that he could hear me talking to the prospects about my book and course, The Shift System, and asking them all sorts of things unrelated to selling a campground membership.
“You are distracting them. You are distracting yourself.”
Right. Of course, I was.
I took a short vacation in February 2002 to see my California family. While I was there, I had an epiphany. I had one focus, and it wasn’t selling camp memberships. I had to publish Living In Grace, and I had to do it right then.
It would take every last bit of our savings, but I decided it was the most important thing I could ever do. Del agreed. I could always get a job later.
But first, finish the book and publish it. It was my one focus!
I called the campground from California and told them my plan and that I would not return to work. The assistant manager, Joe, said, “Go for it. We know you can do it.”
We knew nothing about self-publishing, which was expensive and confusing at the time. Yet we managed to publish and print the book in only two months, just in time to present it at the May book convention in New York City.
Two months. We were compulsively focused.
Nothing has been the same since then.
The book changed our lives and readers' lives, too.
All because my sales manager said to sell one thing at a time, and what I heard was to focus on one thing!
I still ask myself, “What is the one thing you want to accomplish? Focus on that. One Focus.
I still have one focus. Sometimes, that focus results in a book, a podcast, a blog, coaching, a story, or a drawing.
But since that job, I have chosen to sell only one thing—shifting perceptions.
That wasn’t the end of my story with the campground.
Later that summer, they hired me to teach a workshop for their sales team.
I learned the idea of having just one focus from them. As a result, almost all of them, including Joe and the manager, bought The Shift Course and the book Living in Grace.
One focus. What is yours?