It was late on a Sunday afternoon and I was staring at the fax machine humming its way through the last few pages of what had been a very long weekend. I had spent all Friday night and most of the next day sending out our monthly update to over 500 buyers across Latin America, three languages, line after line of glowing praise about our new Landmark flatware collection, and I was about ready to put my feet up when the phone started ringing like crazy. First it was Jose in Mexico City asking if I knew what I’d sent, then Anna in Buenos Aires laughing as she read back “magnificante coleccion de mierda” while I blinked at the wall and tried to figure out how I’d managed to tell half a continent they needed to stock a magnificent collection of crap.
One by one, the calls kept coming from Canada to Chile, folks just cracking up. “Greg, you really said that?” and “You’ve got to be kidding me!” and I could only laugh along while my face turned all kinds of red and hot.
You know, I’d been doing this for a while, sending out those faxes every month like clockwork, trying to make sure everything was just right in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and then one slip of the translation software and suddenly I wasn’t the salesman anymore, I was the guy who told everyone his fancy flatware was a magnificent pile of, well, you get the idea. But the strangest thing happened; instead of losing respect, I became the guy everyone wanted to talk to. I walked into the Chicago Housewares Show a few months later, and some buyer from across the floor shouts, “The fax man! You’re the fax man!” like I was a long-lost friend, and pretty soon I had people coming up to me, grinning, saying, “Greg, we’ve been waiting for you!” and they’d heard about “the fax guy” from six floors up in their offices.
And you know, it’s like that time I checked into a hotel in Caracas, and the staff pretended not to speak a word of English until I started stumbling through some awful Spanish. The moment I tried, however bad it was, they broke into English with big smiles. That’s the thing, isn’t it? When you make the effort to speak someone’s language, even if you trip over every other word, people notice you’re trying, and suddenly you’re not just another business card, you’re an actual human being. So there I was, the fax guy who’d sent out the most spectacularly bad translation ever, and instead of getting a backlash, I found myself on the receiving end of genuine conversations and big orders.
For the next six months, the faxes kept coming back in with more and more orders. CIFRA, down in Mexico, sent over a million-dollar order completely out of nowhere. Every time the machine whirred to life, it was another laugh, another deal, like everyone had decided I was one of them. And I realized, after years of trying to be the polished, perfect salesman, your biggest win might come from showing your flaws because people trust the guy who’s not afraid to mess up.
Looking back, that “magnificante coleccion de mierda” did more for building relationships than all the polished pitches in the world. And sometimes, being the “fax man” is exactly who you’re meant to be.
