Corporate Sales Guy

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).

What the heck is remerchandising relinquishment? I must need a PHd to shop these days.

Hello All-

I’ve had a bit of a melt down here at Corporate Sales Guy in my effort to upgrade to Wordpress 2.81. I’ll have things back to normal in a few days. I hope. Also my apologies to all those folks nice enough to put in comments. I may not be able to recover those.

Thanks,

Shirin