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.