Does anyone else remember the days when you had to drive around to find a pay phone in order to check voicemail or call a customer, and if you were luck it would be a drive-up pay phone so that you could sit in the warmth of your car and talk. How times have changed. While on one of my infamous 6 hour drives across my territory, i could not help but think how technology has changed the landscape of sales and how sales peoples conduct business. When I started selling medical supplies in the early 1990s the only technology I had was a pager and a laptop that weighted about 10 pounds and ran on DOS. On this particular day my drive took me through the Adirondacks Mountains, which I use to call the "dark country" because there wasn't anything for miles and certainly there were no pay phones or pager coverage. On some levels I liked that drive because I didn't have to worry about getting paged or returning calls because there was no communication for miles. Well those days are long gone.
Technology has given us the ability to stay connected no matter where were may find ourselves. On this long drive my blackberry kept me in constant contact with my company, customers and family. It took me a while to embrace my blackberry, I resisted the idea of being available 24/7 anywhere in the world. It was the whole, big brother looking over your shoulder mentality. But in reality this technology and many others have improved my work life balance and how I communicate with my company and customers. As professional sales people we have to embrace technologies that has the capabilities of improving our business and our lives.
Laptops, DSL, WiFi and other technologies that have been introduced in recent years have increased our ability to be productive, increased our business, improved our customer communications and improved our work-life balance. Think about it! In the past, if you were like me, you would get home around 5 or 6 in the evening, plug the phone line into you computer and wait to hear the dial tone that connected you to your company's database. Then you would do quotes, download information, inventory data and reports at a snails pace. You could go take a shower, have dinner, read a story to your kids, put them to bed, make love to your wife and return to your computer and it STILL would not be done downloading. On average, I spent an additional 10-15 hours per week, in the evenings, working at home or from a hotel room. Today i can do all of that in a 1/10th the time and only using my blackberry, everything but making love to my wife, of course.
There are three technologies that I use on a daily bases that I have found indispensable; my blackberry, laptop and GPS. These three items have helped me increase my income and sales every year. For every sales person that is looking to increase their sales and income these three items are necessities.
An important key to being a successful sales professional is embracing technologies that will help you increase your productivity and serve your customers. Because, in the end, it could help you make a lot of money or not having it could cost you a lot of business.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Keys to Selling- Despise not small beginnings
Welcome to my blog.
This is my first attempt at blogging, after hearing so many people talk about blogging I decided to give it a try. The hardest part of blogging is deciding what to talk about. My first thoughts were to talk about my hobbies or things I find enjoyable to do in my spare time. But after thinking about various topics I decided to capture my thoughts, experiences and best practices on what I do best, selling. It's hard to believe that I have been selling since i was in high school in the mid-eighties. It took many years of sole searching and thinking about what else I can do as a profession to come to the realization that I am a professional salesperson and proud of it.
I have sold for many years now, 23 years to be exact, and have had success on different levels. If I am honest with you and myself, I have to admit I did not like some of the sales positions I had over the years and for that reason I may not have been as successful as I could have been. In my younger years, prior to and during college, I had various sales positions, tuxedo rentals, shoes and clothes just to name a few. But the worst was telemarketing, yuk... Early on, selling was primarily a means for me to have money to party with and pay my rent. It was meant to be a stop gap until I realized what i really wanted to do with my life. When I dropped out of college, that topic will be covered on a later blog, I decided to try my hand at selling cars. This actually turned out to be a great move, I was making good money for someone my age and drove a new car all the time. But more importantly and without me knowing it, I was developing some key selling skills that would help me out in later years. Selling cars taught me how not to treat customers. I learned two important things:
1. Treat customers like you want to be treated.
2. Provide superior service and they will purchase from you again.
Future blogs will cover these two key points in detail.
After selling cars for a few years I decided I hated working the long hours, standing around on long winter evenings waiting for a customer to walk through the doors and not making the kind of money I wanted to make. I made another key move that would later prove to propel me into my current career, I decided to try selling office equipment i.e copiers, fax machines and other office technologies.
While selling office equipment I realized something, I hated cold calling. If you were to poll sales representatives on whether they like cold calling or not my guess would be that most would respond that cold calling is their least favorite thing about selling. Although I despised cold calling, selling office equipment helped me developed some key selling skills:
1. Territory management
2. Customer follow-up
3. Developing business relationships that will last for years
4. Mining for opportunities
Again, these topics will be covered in detail in future blogs.
After selling office equipment for a few years an opportunity came along that, although I did not know it at the time, would change my life. A recruiter contacted me about an opportunity to sell medical supplies for a large medical supply company. After years of selling boring products, working terrible hours and not making much money an opportunity came along that would change my career path. The things I hated the most, selling copiers and cold calling proved to be the very things that helped propel me into the most rewarding and enjoyable sales position one could imagine, Medical Sales Representative.
So, my advise to young sales people just starting out, despise not small beginnings you never know what road it may lead you down.
Stay tuned for future blogs on my Keys to Successful selling.
This is my first attempt at blogging, after hearing so many people talk about blogging I decided to give it a try. The hardest part of blogging is deciding what to talk about. My first thoughts were to talk about my hobbies or things I find enjoyable to do in my spare time. But after thinking about various topics I decided to capture my thoughts, experiences and best practices on what I do best, selling. It's hard to believe that I have been selling since i was in high school in the mid-eighties. It took many years of sole searching and thinking about what else I can do as a profession to come to the realization that I am a professional salesperson and proud of it.
I have sold for many years now, 23 years to be exact, and have had success on different levels. If I am honest with you and myself, I have to admit I did not like some of the sales positions I had over the years and for that reason I may not have been as successful as I could have been. In my younger years, prior to and during college, I had various sales positions, tuxedo rentals, shoes and clothes just to name a few. But the worst was telemarketing, yuk... Early on, selling was primarily a means for me to have money to party with and pay my rent. It was meant to be a stop gap until I realized what i really wanted to do with my life. When I dropped out of college, that topic will be covered on a later blog, I decided to try my hand at selling cars. This actually turned out to be a great move, I was making good money for someone my age and drove a new car all the time. But more importantly and without me knowing it, I was developing some key selling skills that would help me out in later years. Selling cars taught me how not to treat customers. I learned two important things:
1. Treat customers like you want to be treated.
2. Provide superior service and they will purchase from you again.
Future blogs will cover these two key points in detail.
After selling cars for a few years I decided I hated working the long hours, standing around on long winter evenings waiting for a customer to walk through the doors and not making the kind of money I wanted to make. I made another key move that would later prove to propel me into my current career, I decided to try selling office equipment i.e copiers, fax machines and other office technologies.
While selling office equipment I realized something, I hated cold calling. If you were to poll sales representatives on whether they like cold calling or not my guess would be that most would respond that cold calling is their least favorite thing about selling. Although I despised cold calling, selling office equipment helped me developed some key selling skills:
1. Territory management
2. Customer follow-up
3. Developing business relationships that will last for years
4. Mining for opportunities
Again, these topics will be covered in detail in future blogs.
After selling office equipment for a few years an opportunity came along that, although I did not know it at the time, would change my life. A recruiter contacted me about an opportunity to sell medical supplies for a large medical supply company. After years of selling boring products, working terrible hours and not making much money an opportunity came along that would change my career path. The things I hated the most, selling copiers and cold calling proved to be the very things that helped propel me into the most rewarding and enjoyable sales position one could imagine, Medical Sales Representative.
So, my advise to young sales people just starting out, despise not small beginnings you never know what road it may lead you down.
Stay tuned for future blogs on my Keys to Successful selling.
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