With the winter season approaching, I recently got my yearly visit from the driving resealing sales people who go door to door in the autumn with their sealing equipment to tow, convincing me that I should allow them to reseal my driveway immediately. The usual sales pitch is that their processes are better than the ones offered by other driveway sealing companies even though it appears to me that they all use the same equipment and materials.

Regardless, this year I got a really funny sales pitch from the guy who rang my doorbell looking to seal my driveway.

He wanted me to do him a favor.

Allow me to explain.

I made a mistake by first showing some interest in getting my driveway resealed when the guy rang my doorbell and I asked him instead for a business card. I told him I’d take a business card and possibly think about having my driveway sealed next year.

I thought this would give him the message I wasn’t a buyer but might be in the future. As in, one year from now. Maybe.

He took this as a “buy sign” I guess because 30 minutes later, he returned and offered to do the driveway for $40 less than what he’d quoted when he rang my doorbell for the first time half an hour earlier.

I again politely declined but reminded him that I had his card and knew where to find him. He wasn’t too happy about this because he explained that he worked for a large company with lots of staff and that he was only working there part time for the summer. In other words, it wouldn’t benefit him if I called his company in the future and someone else got credit for the sale.

I guess he was telling me this in case I cared. Which I didn’t.

I work in sales and I know how commission-based jobs work. I also know that if someone doesn’t want to buy, they don’t want to buy regardless of your sob story.

It reminded me of when my dad and I went to an all-inclusive resort a few years back and we made the mistake of accepting the offer of a “free” welcome breakfast from our hotel, realizing too late that the “free” breakfast was in exchange for us attending a 45 minute session where they’d try to sell us a time share unit that the hotel offered.

When I told our host that we were in no way interested in time shares, she begged us to stay for the whole session because (and I quote) “my boss will be upset with me if you don’t stay for the whole thing.” You gotta love when employees lay out a sob story to try to get you to do something that they want…and we’d already paid to stay at this hotel. They already had our money but I guess they felt entitled to more of it.

Anyways, back to the driveway sealing story. An hour later as I was coming back to my house after a short walk with my daughter, guess who is back on my front door step still looking for a sale?

My favorite driveway sealing guy! And he doesn’t look happy. It turns out that he had made a sale down the street at one of my neighbor’s house to seal her driveway. The bad news was that she thought she would help him out by hosing her driveway off to clean it before the sealing got done.

The problem of course is that driveway sealing has to be done on a dry surface. So my favorite driveway sealing guy made a sale…and then lost it because he was no longer able to seal the wet driveway.

He was pretty angry at losing the sale – he told me several times – and he decided to try and finally close the deal by giving me the funniest reason to buy I’ve heard from a salesperson in a long time:

“You’d be doing me a favor if you’d let me seal your driveway.”

I didn’t bother responding and he went on again about the benefits of getting the driveway resealed and then he repeated the part about me “doing him a favor” by paying him to do something that I really didn’t want.

Again, I ignored the comment.

For a third time, he repeated the request that I do him a favor so at this point I told him I wasn’t in the business of doing people favors when it involves me paying money to do something I didn’t want.

He laughed nervously and seemed to finally realize that he wasn’t getting the sale.

Have you ever had a recruiter try to bully you into taking a job that you didn’t want? Perhaps you started thinking that if they liked the job so much, they should take it instead of you!

How many people have you worked with who try to get you to do their work because they’re too lazy, unmotivated, self-absorbed or all of the above, and because they think they can get away with it?

The bottom line is that from time to time in your career, you’re going to come across people who try to bully you into doing stuff that you don’t want to do.

And from time to time, you’re going to have to stand up for yourself otherwise you’ll probably find that this bullying happens more often and comes from more and more people who recognize you as a pushover.