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Part 2: The Early Bird Meets the Boogeyman

darkmanIn my previous article, “The Early Bird Gets the Sale”, I mentioned that I occasionally have to leave very, very early in the morning in order to make it to my breakfast meetings.

Regardless of the time of day, I caution anyone travelling alone to always be on alert and I’m not just referring to paying attention to the road, but also to your surroundings.   I have to admit, this can be quite difficult in the middle of the night.

To all of my fellow salesmen  and women who hit the road dark and early, this story will serve as a reminder to keep your eyes and ears peeled at all times, because you just never know what sort of shady characters might be lurking in the darkness around you.

One morning I had a 7am breakfast meeting which was a 2.5h drive from home. It was 4:25am, quiet and pitch black outside.  I got into my car, and began to organize my “mobile office” for the day.  As my car was warming up, I placed my laptop on the passenger seat and booted it up.  I normally boot up my computer fully in the morning and then put it to sleep or in hibernation mode throughout the day so that I can easily open and close it before and after meetings rather than have to start it up and shut it down every time.  As I was opening up all of the computer programs that I would use throughout my day, I organized my sales reports, notes and my agenda on the passenger seat.  This whole process usually takes me about 5 minutes.

Once I had everything organized, I glanced at the dashboard clock, smiled and thought to myself “This is great! I feel awake and I’m on time!”. As I closed my laptop and sat back upright in the driver’s seat, I noticed something out of the corner of my left eye.  Before turning my head, I glanced slightly to my left thinking maybe it was just my hair and there it was, the most terrifying thing I had ever seen…

There was a man whose face was covered in bandages pressed up against the window of the driver side of my car!!!  I was so distracted looking at the passenger side of my car that I never saw him approach my vehicle.

I completely panicked!  All I could do was start screaming and flail my hands in the air. As I was doing that, I was thinking to myself how disappointed I was in myself that I was that girl. You know, that girl in the horror movies that just gets paralyzed with fear, screams and then gets brutally murdered?  I am an avid horror movie buff and I really thought that all of those years of watching horror movies would better prepare me for when I would encounter a real life boogeyman; I would be better than that and certainly not be that girl.  But this guy looked just like Darkman! And it was the middle of the night!

Ok, “Time to suck it up Princess!” I told myself.  I had to take action, so I immediately threw my car into reverse and backed out of my driveway at top speed.  Just as I was about to back right out into the street without regard for oncoming traffic, I stopped the car abruptly and thought to myself, “Wait, he is trespassing on MY property!”. 

I put the car into drive and drove back up to the boogeyman, lowered my window just one inch and screamed at him at the top of my lungs “Get the #%*$ off my property!!!!!!”

He then proceeded to calmly ask me for directions to a street that was on the complete opposite side of town and not at all within walking distance.  He spoke as if there was nothing odd at all about his appearance or the fact that he just leaned up into my car window while I was parked in my driveway in the middle of the night!

I was so distraught that for the life of me, I couldn’t tell him if he had to go left or right so I just told him to “Get the #$&* off my property or I’m calling the police!”.

He walked away and I sped off.  Pfewf!!!

As I sped off, I saw my neighbors lights go on.  I found out later that apparently I screamed so loud from inside my car, I woke up my neighbors on the opposite side of my vehicle!

To this day, I’m not sure where the boogeyman came from: The local psychiatric institution? The hospital after a bar fight? Who knows! Regardless, I am lucky that he intended to do me no harm.   Since then, I have installed motion activated lights in my driveway, a monitoring system and I have made it a habit to lock my car as soon as I enter it.

So fellow travelers, the take home message of this story is please be safe and aware of your surroundings.  You never know if the boogeyman will come for you.

Safe Travels.

The Early Bird Gets the Sale

 

Are you in sales and experiencing difficulty pinning a client down for a meeting?  Or have you arranged a meeting with a client only for them to cancel on you last minute?

sunrise_road

Having been in sales for 10 years now, I have heard it all.  Sure sometimes your client may legitimately be too busy or have had some sort of emergency arise and they are unable to meet with you, but what do you do when you feel like your client is constantly dodging you?

Do you keep trying to get that 10am appointment only to show up and have them cancel on you last minute and waste your valuable time?

Do you ask them out to lunch and risk that their day gets too busy and they can’t escape the office? Or even worse, they invite their entire staff along and are too busy socializing amongst themselves to gain any value from your meeting!

Remember, your time is valuable too! You are in sales and time is money.  Don’t waste time scheduling appointments that are inevitably going to fall though.  Presumably you are selling a product or service that can be of value to your client.  You just need that perfect time to sit down with your client and have a mutually beneficial meeting.

How do you find that perfect time for a meeting?

Arrange a Breakfast Meeting

This is the perfect solution to dealing with a dodgy client.  Breakfast meetings are ideal for a number of reasons:

  1. No excuses! Everybody has to eat and what better way to start the day than with a great breakfast? The best part is, it won’t infringe on their busy schedule.
  2. Mutual Respect: Most people eat breakfast before going to work, so if you arrange a breakfast meeting before their regular work day you are also showing them that you value and respect their busy schedule and they will respect you in return.
  3. No distractions: It’s first thing in the morning and the day has just begun. Your client likely hasn’t gone to their office yet and thus, hasn’t had the opportunity to get distracted before your meeting.  You will likely have their undivided attention.
  4. Cereal Position Effect: Ok it’s actually called SERIAL position effect, but since I am on the topic of breakfast I thought that pun was appropriate. The serial position effect is a psychological term used to describe a human tendency to best recall the first and last items on a list.  If you apply this principle to the meetings you schedule throughout the day, you and your client will likely recall more from your meeting if you are the first or last meeting of the day.  Breakfast meetings have an advantage over dinner meetings because both of you are awake and ready to tackle the day.  Dinner meetings on the other hand, may be less productive as you may both be tired and distracted after a long day’s work.  Furthermore if alcohol is consumed during that meeting, your client will likely retain less information.
  5. Breakfast is cheap, short and sweet! At most restaurants breakfast will cost less than $10 per person, take less than an hour and provide the fuel you need to have a fabulous day! This should give you plenty of valuable face-to-face time with your client.  Just don’t forget to ask for the sale when you pick up that tab!

I’m sure most of you are thinking, “Ugh, that would mean I have to get up so much earlier!”.

Yes, yes it does my friends.  But I assure you, it will be worth it.  If it seems too tough to get up that early, then finish your meetings earlier.  For instance if you have a 7am breakfast meeting and your last appointment of the day is at 2 or 3pm, you’ve put in a full day.

My territory is so large that often when I have a breakfast meeting at 7am, that meeting may be a 2.5 hour drive from home or my hotel base.  I tell, you that is an early start!

When you are on the road that early, there are well, let’s say , many ‘oddballs’ out there.  That being said, stay tuned for Part 2 of this article: The Early Bird Meets the Boogeyman.

That’s right, I said the boogeyman.

Safe Travels my friends!

The Travelling Saleswoman

The Busy Bee Gets Stung

Yellow-Jacket-Wasp

Entering a new year, most of us sales professionals will start preparing to hit the pavement once again. As you all know, all of that travel certainly doesn’t always go without incident.   In my first blog post of 2015, I will share with you, one of my funniest “Road Woes” which happened to me while I was working in Quebec last year.

Managing a territory as large as Canada is no simple task.  Calling on mobile medical professionals adds a whole other level of difficulty and requires superior time management skills.  On an average day, I will travel anywhere between 400-500 km and meet with 4 or 5 practitioners.  I’m sure you’re thinking, “That doesn’t sound very efficient!” however, most of my clients (90%) are located in remote areas, travel in a 1-2 hour radius from their office base and frequently get called out to emergencies.  Needless to say, I spend a lot of time on the road and well, anything can happen!

I usually spend the better part of September calling on my clients in Quebec (AKA “La belle province”).  For those of you who are not familiar with Canadian geography, Quebec is the only French speaking province in Canada.  It is essentially its own country with its own culture that is completely different from the rest of Canada.  Whenever I travel there, I always seem to experience the most hardships and not simply because I am an Anglophone.

This past year, I was about half way through my trip.  So far so good I thought.  No speeding tickets, no accident and no flat tires. I was travelling along Aut-55 to Sherbrooke grooving along to some tunes approximately 1 hour from my destination when I discovered a large bee inside my vehicle.  To be precise, it wasn’t a bee but rather a yellow jacket which is a type of wasp. It was approximately 1” long which is quite huge!

Everyone always says that if you don’t provoke them, that they won’t sting you.  Well, everyone is wrong.  So wrong!

When I first noticed it sitting on my passenger seat, I thought (and hoped) that if I simply opened the window it will just fly out.  But it didn’t. I suppose driving at 120km/hr isn’t exactly conducive to flying out of a window if you are a wasp.

How did it even get in my car without me noticing?  A few days prior when I was unloading my things from my trunk, I noticed a large wasp land inside my trunk. It didn’t leave and I couldn’t find it, so I closed my trunk and forgot about it.

Well, somehow this thing was still alive and it made its way into the front seat of my car and boy, it wasn’t happy!

I continued driving and tried to remain calm, telling myself “If you don’t piss it off, it won’t sting you.”.  I was planning on keeping calm and taking the next exit to safely pull off the road, stop the car, open the windows and doors and let it out of my vehicle.

Then suddenly, I felt an excruciating, sharp, stabbing pain in my back!

The wasp was under my shirt and bit me.  Even though I leaned forward towards the steering wheel, it continued to bite me and again, and again.

After the fourth bite, I was delirious with pain and could barely concentrate on the road.  I was still 2km from the next exit and I just couldn’t take it any longer, so I swerved my car to the side of the road and pulled over.  The car was still moving when I threw it into park.  At that point I really didn’t care if I ruined my transmission.  I immediately jumped out of my car, ripped my shirt off and started running around screaming at the top of my lungs.

So there I was, on the side of a major highway, running around my car wearing just a bra and screaming like a madwoman!  I’m sure someone caught that on video and posted it on YouTube somewhere.

I knew I was bit pretty bad and I needed some sort of treatment.  Fortunately I had my fishing gear in my trunk and in it I had a tube of AfterBite.  I couldn’t apply it to my back directly, so I squirted the stuff all over the window of the passenger side of my car and then proceeded to rub my back all over it.  Classy move, I know!  But it helped a bit.  Thank goodness I wasn’t allergic!

As I drove to my hotel, I was thinking, “What if I was allergic and had a medical crisis while I am here in Quebec? If I call 911, do they even speak English?”.

When I arrived at my hotel, I asked the concierge that very question.  She informed me that it is mandatory for all 911 operators in Quebec to speak English.

This turned out to be very useful information as the next day, I was involved in a car accident with a man who did not speak English and I had to call the police.   If I didn’t know they spoke English, I probably wouldn’t have made that phone call and the guy who hit me would have gotten away.

All things happen for a reason I suppose.

So the next time you’re driving on the highway and you see someone driving erratically, just think, maybe they are getting violently stung by wasps. This experience has given me a whole new perspective on “distracted driving”.  You never know what’s really going on behind someone else’s wheel.

Drive safe fellow travellers.

How to Handle Clients who Want More than What You’re Selling

 

Salespeople are expected to always conduct business in a most professional manner.  So what happens when you are faced with a client who acts unprofessionally and say, starts to flirt with you?

Whether you are a man or a woman, if you are in sales, surely this exact scenario has happened to you at least once if not several times in your career.  So what do you do?

Although it is quite well established that “sex sells”, the last thing any salesperson should ever do in a sales call is use “sex” to sell, even if your client is flirting with you. You might be thinking “Why? That is so easy?”  Well, here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t:

  1. Your client will not respect you. You are “pulling the wool over their eyes” and they will see through this.
  2. You will not likely get repeat orders. Sure, using your sex appeal may help you close that deal.  Who cares about your product anyway right? But after they receive their order, they will have second thoughts.  Just like a one night stand; you think it’s all great and fun at the time and then you wake up to what you thought was a super-hot person next to you and now that  the beer goggles are off, they look more like a dishevelled dog, who’s name you don’t even know. Don’t be surprised if they return your order.
  3. Forget about that product/service reference. So you flirted your way to close a big deal with an important client who wasn’t buying from you. Time to celebrate right? Wrong.  If another client asks them why they purchased your product, they certainly aren’t going to tell them how wonderful your product is.  Why did they buy? Do you really want your clients discussing this amongst one another?  I most certainly would not.
  4. It shows you suck at selling. But you closed that deal right? So you must be good at sales? You obviously weren’t able to effectively communicate the value of the product or service you are selling, so you had to resort to other means.  It is one thing to sell yourself as a resource to your client, but another entirely to just flirt your way through sale.  What should you do then?  Take a sales course.  Improve those sales skills and don’t stoop to that level. If that doesn’t work, perhaps it’s time to consider another career.

Fortunately, I have not been faced with this scenario very often. In the past 10 years that I have been on the road, there have only been a handful of clients who have been overly flirtatious with me.

If you ever find yourself in this type of situation, just keep in mind exactly what it is you want to accomplish.  We all want to make that sale, but if you want repeat orders, your clients will likely only do so if you have more to bring to the table.   So, whether it is your amazing product or service or your resourcefulness, make sure to sell yourself and the company you are representing the right way, a way that earns you respect so you can keep those orders coming in.

Happy Sales!