Surviving the slow season

Traditionally summer time is a slow period in sales. People are vacationing or are having to cover for individuals who are on vacation. For many salespeople getting in to see customers and potential customers can be a challenge. Trying to close business can be a challenge as well. And although the summer can be slow, business must move forward. We still have a quota to meet, reports to complete and other vital business responsibilities we have to met. While it may be slow on the sales calls front, the summer can still be very productive. Here are a few tips to help survive the summer slow down and move business forward when things seems to be at a stand still.

While business may be a bit slow, the summer season is the perfect relationship building season. In my experience, the summer can provide an opportunity for you and your customers to get out of the office and enjoy the nice weather while building relationships. No other time of year provides this opportunity like the summer does. Summer time activities such as golfing, tennis and baseball games are perfect activities to involve customers. These are great relationship building activities that can be done with customers and can help cement business relationships that will pay dividends down the road.

The summer season is also the beginning of trade show season. Many professional organizations have their yearly conferences in the summer and early fall. Trade shows provide an excellent opportunities to build relationships. Supporting your customers professional organizations conferences shows you are interested in what they are interested in. Professional organizations such as the AACC, AARC, AORN, PGA and CLMA, just to name a few, rely on vendor support to fund their membership drives, education funds and other useful causes. Use the slow summer season as a time of support for your customers, they will really appreciated it and you will benefit from it in the long run.

As I have mentioned in past post, relationships are key to successful selling, regardless of matter what you are selling. Most people take time off in the summer to spend time with their family, do some traveling or just to relax. When you meet with customers, this is a great ice breaking opening topic to discuss. If I know a customer has been on vacation, I will ask them how their vacation was, where they went on vacation, did they do anything interesting etc... Most people like talking about themselves and what interests them and most people are open to these types of discussions. If you are sincere in your conversation and questioning, customers appreciate you taking time to listen to them on matters other than what you have to sell.

Lastly, when the summer slows your business, this can be a good time to make sure your home office is as efficient and organized as possible. I like to spend less time in my home office and more time in front of customers but there are times when you should take inventory of your home office and make sure it is organized and functional.

Enjoy your summer.

Take a REAL vacation

If you have been in sales for any period of time you know that taking a vacation can be an oxymoron. The reality is that, as sales people we are always either thinking about our next sales call, thinking about paperwork we have to complete or phone calls we have to make. Even when we are "away" from work we are thinking about work. Having an office in our home just adds to our constant reminder of task we have to complete. So the question today is, can a sales person truly take a real vacation? One where you can relax your mind, body and spirit. And if you are married with kids, can we truly take time to spend with our family and not be occupied with thoughts of work or sneaking in one last phone call. With proper planning, the answer is yes.

As a medical sales representative and one that works out of my home, I can speak first hand about the difficulty of taking time off and not doing or thinking about work. It is hard. Even on weekends, there are times that I pass my office and think, I really should get that report done before Monday or maybe I can check email real quickly. While it is important to complete necessary reports and check emails, on our time off it's more important to spend time relaxing, recharging our batteries and spending valuable time with our love ones. Many managers believe and even insist that their sales people check email once or twice on weekends. I contend that it is impossible to just "check" email. Once you are on email it's hard to get off. Managers have to remember, for a sales person to be successful they have to have down time. Technology has made it easier for you to have your downtime and still stay connected with work and customers. Blackberry is a great example.

When taking a vacation, this is truly time in which you should be relaxing. I have to admit that while on vacation I tend to check email and/or voicemail for the simple reason I do not what to face dozens of emails my first day back. I make it a rule not to spend more than a few minutes scanning messages and listening to voicemail.

To make your vacation more enjoyable and not have to worry about work, here are a few tips:
1. Schedule your vacation well in advance- this will give you time to finish up important projects and close important deals
2. Vacation during typical slow times- For me, summers tend to be slow times. many of my customers are vacationing and taking more time off to enjoy the warm weather.
3. Let management know ASAP when your vacation will be- This will avoid scheduling conflicts with sales meeting and other important company dates.
4. Arrange for coverage- Team up with another sales person, preferable one that is close to your territory. Make arrangements for that person to cover an emergencies that may come up and give important customers that sales persons contact information. Be sure to 5. Inform your customers- Let important customers know when you are going on vacation and remind them 1 weeks before you leave. Give them the contact information for the person covering your accounts.
6. Finish important projects- it's important that you return the favor when that person wants to vacations.
inish important projects and to-do list items before you leave. Nothing is worst than laying on a nice beach, miles from the nearest computer or phone and remember that you forgot to get a quote to a customer.
7. Post notices that you are away for work- Post a notice on voicemail and email that you will be on vacation and when you are returning. Leave contact information for the person who will be coverning for you.

Remember, vacation is just that, time to unwind, relax and recharge your engine, if done right you will return ready for a big finish to your year. Good selling!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.

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.