My Hardest Sales Call
Starting this blog reminds me of when I first became a salesman and had to make my first cold call. I put it off as long as I could. Worried myself sick. Drove through the parking lot several times. Then when I thought I was ready I put it off for another day.
Luckily, I had a great sales manager that encouraged me and had the patience to help a young insecure account manager get started. I knew what I needed to do and had no doubt I could do it but the time never seemed quite right.
Finally, I got the courage, parked my car, went inside and made my call. I would like to say I got a huge order and they are still a customer but that is not the case.
I’m not sure cold calls have ever gotten any easier for me but without a steady flow of new customers and products your business will eventually fail. We as sales managers must constantly encourage, train and sometimes demand our account managers to solicit new business. If we don’t have them make time in their schedule for cold calling and growing their accounts there will be a time when a customer retires, closes their business or moves their business to a competitor and they won’t have the skills to get back in growth mode.
I’ve seen very successful account managers struggle towards the end of their career simply because they did not keep adding new customers to their account package. Many of their once profitable accounts just slowly wither and die.
Every sales plan must have expectations and goals which require some form of cold calling or as we now refer to it as networking included in the plan. Look for more on effective networking in a future post.
Now back to starting a blog. What I did learn making cold calls was; putting off what I knew I needed to do and worrying myself sick didn’t make the sales call any easier. Without making cold calls I could have never got to where I am now, a much older insecure salesman putting off and worrying about starting a sales and sales management blog.
Time to Start!
For the past year I have been seeking a way to communicate my
thoughts and experiences in a timely and effective way. As a regional sales manager for a large wholesale distributor, I travel most days of the month. Most weeks something comes up or I read an article that I would like to get to our sales team to teach and inspire.
Email would be a timely way to get the information to our team but is not as effective as in person discussions. Waiting for weeks until I can make it to their location would be more effective but is certainly not timely. Email would also limit the discussion to those within my circle of co-workers and friends. In person training would further limit my reach to only co-workers and friends that I actually see.
So it is my hope that this blog site will be both timely and effective. I believe the topics and discussions I’m sharing will be interesting and beneficial to more than those I currently know.
Sales Managers, no matter what industry or products, have much in common. We must:
- Prioritize our efforts
- Create a sales process that is effective and repeatable
- Focus and target our energies
- Maintain and cultivate new and existing customers and products
- Repeat, repeat, repeat
The list above I believe are the basics and have been proven over time to be the skills we as sales managers work with our sales teams to learn and improve upon.
I have attended many sales seminars and worked with several national sales trainers and it seems these are the consistent topics. They may call it:
- Time management
- Sales cycle
- Show a target with an arrow in the center
- Prospect
- Do all over again
The challenge we all have is how to adapt the basics, which have in the past proven to be successful, to a quickly changing sales environment. We must now adapt our training to a younger sales team that has vastly different sets of skills than the sales team of just a few years ago.
We must also focus on teaching our existing sales team how to sell into a changing market that expects more than product knowledge and a lunch every once in a while.
Those who can find a way to meld the old with the new will have the greatest success and most enjoyment.
So here we go stepping into a new and exciting adventure called blogging. I welcome your comments and suggestions. I don’t have all the answers. Heck, some days I feel I have no answers. How about you!
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