Corporate Sales Guy

A while back I was listening to a song off the Buddha Bar Album called Daydreaming by Rollercone. The song starts off with a short spoken poem and part of it goes like this:

“…and when they do something that they love, because when you do something you love, no matter what it is, you do it well.”

It’s amazing, when you do something you love it stops feeling like work. You almost don’t get tired even if you have an extra long or hard day.

For years I’ve been a comfortable employee of well, uh employers I guess. For a small stint in the early 2000’s I owned a share of a car rental franchise and before that the last venture I had was my lawn mowing service at age 17-18.

Long story short – I’ve joined an old colleague of mine to co-found a company called ColoAdvisor. We are basically agnostic datacenter brokers for all things hosting, colocation, messaging, managed apps and Cloud. Check us out at www.coloadvisor.com – I’m still going to keep the blog up and running and now I may have more interesting things to share.

For a brief video of what we do, check it out below and let me know if you have any needs !

Best wishes, and thanks for continuing to read my sporadic posts and rants that put here.

Is it wrong to hate the suit and the tie? I find myself craving a hot cup of coffee, my MacBook pro, well worn jeans and a true goal for that day. At times I’ve forgotten why I do certain clerical tasks and as I begin to feel satisfied with the accomplishment of these tasks I become quickly saddened. As a salesperson, no deal has been closed, no contract signed, no rectification of the clients issues.

I recently took some major steps to getting closer to my ideal life work. Folks that know what I am doing may justifiably call me crazy but folks that end up doing what they want in life never have it easy.

My favorite part of the official definition from google, ” intrinsic – wholly independent of any other object, action or consequence “

This is what sales folks need these days. Your plaque will become a door stop or occupy space in a landfill for sure.

-CSG

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-10/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-09/

Mr. Wizard, Get me the hell out of here.

-Neo, The Matrix

I’ve told people in order to excel at sales their body needs to be able to bear the burden of sales planning and execution.  Of course this coming from a guy that’s probably about 25 pounds over weight didn’t seem to have a great effect on folks.

Recently I got sick of being sick of being out of shape and decided to start working out. Its been a tough start but it’s amazing how quickly the results show. Don’t get me wrong, I am still overweight and have  a long ways to go but I’ve felt the following effects.

1. It’s way easier to get up in the morning even without 8 hours of sleep.

2. I have more energy through out the day.

3. My thinking is clearer and I can work through complex issues easier.

4. My attitude is much better overall, my mood swings, bouts of anxiety and stress have been greatly reduced.

5. I’ve lost fat around my arms, legs, face and neck. (The remaining fat is around my midsection and is slowly going away) Makes a better impression when presenting or meeting clients face to face.

6. I am able to do all that’s required at work, come home and put the children to bed. (I used not be able to get off the couch when I came home until bed usually which meant I consumed lots of TV).

I’ve come to the conclusion that we absolutely have to be active as sales people. In the corporate sales environment now we spend so much time in meetings, airplanes, airports just sitting. I remember when I first started working we used to use desktop computers which may have leant itself to a bit of a better posture (full sized monitor and keyboard) but as we went portable and got laptops the posture that I see most people assume is terrible and resembles that of a turtle. This issue in itself caused me about 3 months at the chiropractor before I worked all the issues out of my neck and back.

Additionally, with all the reporting and silliness required in the corporate environment it’s important to get off the desk and to move around. I haven’t found that perfect mix of things to do for a workout and I’ll confess that I am no expert but just hitting the gym or running even without a perfect plan is staring to make a difference. Once I get my rhythm set I’ll be sure to consult a personal trainer on the most efficient ways to work out.

If you want to read my views of where corporate america is going as far as reporting read my past pasts here and here.

Thanks for reading.

Do any of you have travel rituals? It’s funny, but I have some almost OCD like traveling “things” that I must do when I am on business travel. For personal travel I am not nearly as particular as I am usually not in as much of a hurry.

The Night Before

Absolutely have to be completely packed even if I am doing a day trip. (No morning packing)

Have to have boarding pass printed and sitting in my laptop bag ready to go

Keys, wallet, car keys, watch, cell phone(s) have to be piled together next to laptop bag (I’ll make an exception with the iPhone as it’s my alarm clock on occasion)

When booking the reservation, I insist that the frequent flyer status and mileage show on my boarding pass (helps in some airports with premium lines)

All bags have to be near front door

All electronics have to be charged, iPhone, Jawbone Headset and laptop. (All chargers have to be packed in laptop back)

I have to have the bare minimum packed, nothing extra.

New city – Gotta have my Garmin GPS packed.

The Morning Of

I have to get up way earlier than required to have a stress free trip

If my meeting requires a tie, I won’t wear it until I arrive to the clients site (or close) Hate wearing ties on a plane

Have to leave to the airport way before my flight to reduce traveling stress

At the Airport

Have to jam all metallic objects into my laptop bag (zippered pocket) and not put them on the conveyor. (Fear of loss possibly?)

Even if I am dying for coffee, food or a bio break I always like to wait until I get to the other side of security screening.

Not a must have, but I like to eat breakfast at the airport. Traveling is much nicer when not starving on the flight (since food is no longer offered).

Have to grab a seat at the exact gate we flying out of. I’ve almost missed flights where I sat at a nearby gate that was less populated.

On the Plane

Love an aisle seat, easier for bio breaks and closer to the front the better for comfort.

I prefer the back of the plane when I know there’s an empty row I can grab.

I prefer both bags in the overhead bin, hate having the briefcase at my feet.

Reading material has to be in the pouch in front of me for easy reach.

Prefer analog reading material – allows me to read at the beginning and end of the flight.

In the Hotel Room

If my suit has been wrinkled I have to have it ironed the night before the meeting.

Once my son touched the coffee maker in the hotel room (those small ones) and burned his hand so I now always have to take a whack at the coffee maker. I am sure to report the whacking to my son upon my return home. He always gets a kick out of this silly thing I do.

I have to keep the room really tidy, I only allow the desk/work area to get cluttered with my work stuff.

If you decide to unsubscribe from my blog I won’t blame you. This is one of the few things I somewhat obsess about as it makes traveling easier for me. When traveling with family I drop the Type A personality and tend to be much more laid back.

Happy Selling,

CSG

I had a great opportunity last week to get a very quiet hour to work uninterrupted when I found myself outside of a clients office 1 hour earlier than our scheduled time to meet. As I’ve mentioned- at work it’s Windows XP. At home for all my personal stuff (political work, community service, home movies and photography) it’s a Mac that I use.

Of course, there’s a Starbucks outside the clients office and I get free internet for 2 hours per day because I have a Starbucks card. I grab an iced coffee and fire up the corporate PC and here’s how the hour unfolds:

1. Wait 2 minutes for my very new/modern corporate laptop to boot
2. Wait 1 more minute for all the security stuff to load up (NAC etc)
3. Wait about 4 minutes for Firefox load because there’s some extension update and since I am not authenticated via At&t’s WiFi it’s not having great success getting updates.
4. Firefox boots up and my starbucks creds have been forgotten by my 3rd party app that saves my passwords.
5. I reset my password and only receive it because I have my iPhone with me.
6. I want to Pop in the password and I think I am on my way but now I getting molassas performance on firefox, can’t get to Starbucks landing page to enter new password.
7. Decide to reboot, wait 3 minutes before I get response from XP.
8. Same thing happens again, of course the temp password I got is no longer on the clipboard and it was a weird combo that I couldn’t remember.
9. Had to reset password again
10. Login in, firefox still dragging.
11. Try to use explorer, loads up quickly but won’t find AT&T landing page to allow login.
12. Firefox finally gets up and running, finds landing page.
13. I fire up my VPN client which connects
14. Start outlook and watch it try to sync all my emails which takes another 3 minutes since I’d been out of the office for 2-3 hours.

I’ve eaten up 40 minutes screwing with this, I need to now pack and get over to my clients site, didn’t get any of the to-do’s off my list knocked out during this period.

Had I attempted this with my mac:

1. Wouldn’t have needed to boot up. The mac wakes up from sleep so nicely that I rarely turn the thing off. I usually reboot it once a month just for preventative maintenance.

2. Safari would have grabbed the Starbucks landing page almost immediately.

3. I would have pushed my credentials via 1Password after putting in my master password (only once per session).

4. Fire up Apple Mail and I would have been set. This would have probably have all taken about 1 minute.

If I needed a VPN to get to my email, I have a VPN client made by Apani which is very quick to fire up. This would have added about 10 more seconds.

Any other users out there trapped in the land of corporate windows? Between dual factor authentication, NAC checking your every move and bloated anti-virus software its hard to get work done on the road. To the credit of my IT department these things aren’t an issue when in the cube farm with a direct Ethernet connection. But we’re in sales, what the heck are we doing in the office? (Unless you’re inside sales – which is a great place to be too).