Corporate Sales Guy

It was ~1995, I was selling Automotive chemicals into Car Dealerships, Car washes and Auto Body Shops. Shipping and management of distant territories were impossible from our MD based headquarters so we chose to find key distributors in all the major cities east of the Mississippi.

I had an IBM Aptiva, P166 computer running Act! 2.0. Back then I had the ability to do the following items:

1. Scroll through my account lists very quickly while viewing notes that would populate at the bottom of the screen in perfect realtime.

2. Quickly chose an account, click “correspondence” and instantly generate a distributor pricing which I would print to our HP LaserJet III printer (while printing an envelope) and dropping into snail mail or directly faxing from the computer. (my modem port was connected to our fax line which allowed me to do many cool things with a good ole’ analog line)

3. Sync my entire Act database with my Palm Pilot Professional (with it’s whopping 1 MB of RAM!). I could be on the road with my palm pilot and have detailed contact info and notes on each of my accounts.

4. Trying to build a really tight distributor network required sifting through many unqualified companies; to do this I’d make between 10 and 50 calls a day. In Act, I would have my prospect list for the entire country loaded into a list tagged prospects and proceed to have Act dial each one of them. When a human voice would answer I would pick up my phone and the call would be right there. I could pop open a notes field on my computer and document the conversation which would be date stamped (maybe time stamped too, I can’t remember).

5. Everything was fast and local. Even when I needed to add additional users to the system it was still fast, sure none of us were working remotely or dong this work from home but with our 10 Mbps ethernet based network at the office we were in love. (We had 2 SMC Hubs connected together which linked all the computers together.

My life now, using Saleforce Enterprise, a Mac Laptop (2.16 GHz, 3 GB of RAM) and an Blackberry 8700.

1. Salesforce has a cool mode called “console” which uses Ajax to smoothly scroll through my contacts, definitely not as fast as local but getting there. The data at the bottom of the screen is cluttered with info that my management team needs, not me. (not salesforce’s fault really, I know these things are customizable)

2. Corresponding with existing customers takes a few extra steps. To build and develop templates seems to be tricky and I haven’t used it yet. Faxing directly from the computer is definitely not an option ( at least not from the server ).

3. Using a mac there’s one program out there that allows synching of contact info and dates. It’s very nice and up and coming but doesn’t allow for segregation of my address book data and grouping. Literally all my contacts in my addressbook are sent to salesforce as accounts which includes my parents, my accountant, my wife and my religious institution – not of which would be targets for the services I sell today. This app has great potential. For taking the data on the road with me I can try to browse with a web browser on my Blackberry but it hasn’t been very usable. For a small monthly fee I can have full access using the BB.

4. Cannot dial with salesforce. Sure we could look at VOIP enabling our server but this is a high cost for just a simple efficient perk.

5. I’ll have to hand it to Salesforce, the console mode takes huge steps towards making the user experience seem local and like a fat client. Based on your internet bandwidth and the configuration of salesforce this can be at times disappointing however.

My point here is not to rant but to point out that we are definitely coming to grips with web based applications. Back in the day I ran Act alone since I was the only person responsible for sales whereas now I work for a company that has dozens of reps inside and outside. I travel to our corporate HQ once a month at most. Being a loose follower of GTD and being generally an efficiency nut makes me look at the tools I use daily and try to shave off precious seconds off each thing I do.

For the small business, with all users connected on a fast LAN I think I’d still pull for a locally installed sales force automation tool. I am sure this will change and salesforce and sugarcrm get their applications polished. What are you using in your sales life? Is it even automated at all? I relied on a tickler file system for sometime and had reasonable success with it.

I’ve been working on some home improvement projects around the house now that the weather isn’t terribly hot. My latest project is building a walkway that runs parallel to my driveway and connects to an existing brick walkway that takes you to my front door. This will prevent folks that step out from a car on the driveway from stepping into the mud which accumulates on the side of the driveway since grass wont grow there due to the foot and car traffic when we overrun the driveway.

Eitherway, I was outside working on digging out the grass and trying to get about 7-8″ down below the level of the driveway through tough clay. Left outside without my cell phone and with only 2 shovels (large and small) I found that it was very easy to just keep working until I got to the end of the driveway. I didn’t have any phone calls, no instant messages, emails didn’t creep over the drive way and land inside my trench. It was actually quite hard to do anything but dig unless I was just taking a break. The longer I worked at the same task the more efficient I became. Even minor corrections to the angle in which I dug the shovel into the ground seemed to make small differences that added up over the course of the few hours I worked.

It reminds me of the introduction to Getting things Done by David Allen where we writes about the knowledge worker whose limits of responsibility are no longer defined in contrast to the factory worker who finishes a manufactured product. Easy to know when the job is complete; product assembled = job done. Whereas as a knowledge worker you may have finished a project but noticed that new people in your department struggle to learn the ropes at your company so since there’s no department responsible for training in your company you take it upon yourself to develop a training program that consists of maybe an intranet site, a manual and possibly a PowerPoint slide show that is used during the orientation of the new employee. Of course in the long run this makes your job easier since you’ll spend less time hand holding and answering questions but this wasn’t necessarily in the job description.

I guess my thought here was that with the removal of distractions of emails, phones and instant messages it’s easier to stay on task and finish a job. The longer one stays on a particular task the more efficient that person becomes at completing it. Interruptions not only prolong the duration of a task but add 1 to 20 minutes of “warm up” time required to return to the efficient level one had achieved. What’s our recourse? Does one take drastic actions physically to limit inputs in ones life? Possibly the consolidation of all communication into one device which at certain times of the day is turned off? Were we better off using MS DOS with applications that run one at a time? One has to wonder about this. For an enjoyable read on consolidating communications I’ve been kicking around the idea of going to GrandCentral based on an article by Productivity Guru Merlin Mann.

For the sales person this is very critical. We are only earning our keep when we are speaking to clients and following up on specific needs for each client. Building excellent partner networks and keeping in touch with our industry contacts is what allows us to achieve some momentum in sales. Spending loads of time on internal process and billing issues directly affect our bottom line and are definitely poor excuses to give to management as to why we are underperforming.