How Vaping Made Me More Successful

After 2 years at my job in software sales, I felt that I was stuck in neutral. The leads would come from the marketing team, I would jump on as many of them as I can as quickly as possible, and by the end of the month, I’d close 2-3 new clients. So since the start, my quarterly commissions have been pretty much flat. I reviewed all my daily tasks, my pitch, and my entire process. It was during our 2^nd session that she said, “You are Vaping your success away.”

This is my first sales job so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it seems that my colleagues at work are moving me even though we are doing the same thing.  Then, 4 months ago I hired a sales coach that I paid for with my own money. At the time, it felt like literally the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. I knew she had this holistic approach that helped salespeople perform by focusing on mind, body, soul, etc.., so I expected to hear a lecture about being more consistent with my exercise regimen or taking steps to lower my stress. But being told that smoking was hurting my sales numbers was not something I was prepared for.

I’ve been smoking for 10 years and if anything, I’ve always felt that smoking had helped me in my career. It gave me a way to reward myself after grinding through a couple of hours of uninterrupted work. This motivated me to work hard and get through my tasks, making better use of my time. It also helped me cope with the stress of the job.

But when my coach, Liz, sat down with me to painstakingly review my day, minute by minute, she made me realize that I had it all wrong. When I calculated how much time away from my desk each cigarette was costing me, I came out to 25 minutes, including the time spent riding the elevator, walking to the designated vaping space outside, and washing up after I was done. I normally had 3 cigarettes outside of my lunch break, so in total vaping took me away from actual sales work for 75 minutes per day. I sell software to companies, which means my clients are generally only free to speak between 10 AM and 4 PM.

That’s a 6-hour window during which I can make calls, aside from the 30-window between 1 and 1:30 during which nobody answers the phone. I was removing 75 minutes from this window aside from an hour during which I would grab a quick lunch and have a smoke. That comes out to 3 hours and 45 minutes of sales during my 6-hour window. That means, 41% of the time I could be selling was being spent on other things. When Lize made me realize this, my jaw dropped.

I immediately started looking online for ways to either quit smoking or find some alternative. I read tens of articles and then found myself reading about vape kits for beginners. I wish I could tell you that I quit smoking cold turkey. That didn’t happen. But what did happen was that I successfully transitioned from cigarettes to vapes and recaptured my wasted time as my office has a policy that vaping is permitted indoors as long as long as it doesn’t bother your co-workers.

So now I vape from my desk and can spend more time speaking to customers and responding to new leads more quickly. Since making this change, I have had at least 5 sales each month, and 9 new clients last month!

There are always other factors at play, but this has been the only major change I’ve made and it’s been the best thing I’ve done for my career in a while.