572 yuan in his pocket, a phone with a shattered screen, and half a month’s rent overdue.
His boss ran off with the company’s money, wiping out three months of wages. Every penny he had saved went toward his mother’s surgery. Su Chen arrived in Shenzhen with a suitcase and took a job at a small exhibition company. His supervisor tossed him a register of dead accounts, untouched for two and a half years. “If you can’t find gold in there, you’re out.”
No one knows he has a camera in his mind.
The instant he comes into contact with a real order, a frame freezes before his eyes with a click: which side of the contract the client puts their pen down on, whether they push the proposal to the edge of the table or nod, whether the screen at the booth is lit or dark. It gives him one to three seconds of direction, but never the answer.
Starting with the first 80,000 yuan he digs out of those dead accounts, he faces Liu Fang stealing his proposal, competitors poaching his staff, his boss taking credit, construction crews going on strike, and a price-fixing cartel closing in... Others rely on connections. He relies on capturing failure in advance, one frame at a time, then recreating the conditions for a sale in the real world, one by one.
456 leads at the medical expo, 420,000 yuan from Kangtai, 168,000 yuan from Kangjian, an 8-million-yuan contract for the city expo...
Someone offers him double his salary to poach him: “Name your terms.”
He says, “I’m not one to play along.”
Someone asks him, “Have you ever thought about starting your own business?”
This is the story of a salesman who starts with 500 yuan and signs one order after another in Shenzhen.
It has a sense of reality and the details are well handled. It is a book worth recommending.
It's rare to find such a delicately written novel these days.