From Pay Phones to Cell Phones

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.