Corporate Sales Guy

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).

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

I haven’t gotten through Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Lunch Alone entirely but I love the message he sends out. I think what he outlines in his book is paramount. I find that I always want to reach out to folks and ping them just to check in and make sure they are ok. It’s funny with folks that don’t know me as well, I can hear the anxiety in their voice as I continue to talk but have yet to “pop the question” as to the reason I am calling. More often than not, I will let the person off the hook early into the call. I’ll start with, “You are probably wondering why I am calling you, well – I seriously don’t need anything but wanted to check in on you. Last time we spoke you had mentioned [insert that item here], how is that going?”

With the updates that hit me from Plaxo and Linkedin I literally can skim the updates and determine if a person’s been let go, or is about to get let go. This usually occurs when I see folks that are normally very quiet stir up a whirl wind of networking activities. This unfortunately is way too late and it always makes me feel sad when I see it. As salespeople, we have no excuse not to constantly network.

-CSG

After 18 years in sales I realized one thing. Unless you genuinely like your client and they genuinely like you you won’t sell them a thing. There are always exceptions but this has been my experience for years. So many folks will tell you to build rapport and get the customer to like you. This is 50% of the task, it’s as if they can detect that you don’t like them and they choose to buy elsewhere. (This applies even to the person who can come across as ultra-sincere; it must be a meta-physical thing).

I’ve always walked away from folks that I knew I didn’t like or that I felt would be high maintenance after the deal was closed. The good news is that if you truly like your client you’ll earn their business if you meet their other needs.

I was struck by a comment in Fast Company magazine that really seemed to ring true to me. As sales people and entrepreneurs work towards their goals, I find that they are victims of folks that want to sell them “tools”. In many cases these tools take the form of books, software and seminars. It’s important to have a solid setup and I’ve expounded my love for tools like Omnifocus and GTD but I feel so many folks are producing crap just to make a buck.

When referring to the darker side of productivity, the sad part about this is as the corporate world becomes more unstable, folks are really seeking alternative means to make a living and can be quite desperate and willing to run up a credit card for a seminar that they can’t possibly afford . This is probably why no reader of this blog has been spared the MLM pitch from a normally sane and trusted friend.

I guess the long and short of my post today is to organize, clean off the desk, get those files put away or shredded that are stacking up on your desk. Get the labeler because it makes sense, spend $70 on good software or if you want to eliminate your file cabinet then go ahead and grab a multi-sheet scanner to digitize your files. Spend a day or 2 on this at most and then as Guy Kawasaki says, “Just get going.” No more excuses – if your model requires 50 phone calls a day, get going, if you to increase your networking at events – then grab your favorite shirt and tie (or dress/skirt) and get out there and do it.

Having the perfect setup in the office won’t matter if the core of your sales effort or business is being pushed off for setting up or organizing. I’d love to hear in the comments from folks that had to finally cut the “analysis of tools phase” loose and began to really build pipelines and their businesses!

For additional inspiration on this topic, Merlin Mann writes an amazing article about it called Real Advice Hurts .

As I’ve written in the past – the most productive sales person has their entire day planned out at least 1 night in advance. Preferably more than a few days in advance. I write about it here. I also feel that the best use of time is out in the field in front of clients pushing for the next step in the selling process. But what about those times you have to crank out a proposal or you are working on internal reporting that is unavoidable in a post-sarbanes oxley world? This usually involves being stuck at a desk somewhere home office or maybe the cube farm.

So when we are desk jockying what approach do we take? Should I splurge on the fancy home office with the 3 piece desk complete with credenza and spend good money on a chair etc? I remember reading an article about stand up desks, read about it here. Hard to say, check out the 2 articles (very in-depth and both are very entertaining reads.) Feel free to comment below.

-csg

Going back to basics and an item seasoned folks will know and remember but it’s always good to refresh. So if you have a deal forecasted at any percentage the 5 things that must exist are:

1. Solution

You have what they need. If they want a small reliable foreign car with great gas mileage, you don’t have the right solution if you are selling SUV’s. It’s got to be a good fit and such a good fit that when they want to upgrade in 5 years they will come back to you unconditionally.

2. Budget

Sometimes my budget is expansive other times it’s not. You have to completely understand the budget and it’s not enough to have a customer tell you, “Based on what you give me, I will formulate my budget.” I use a Sandler technique taught to me by Steve (thanks Steve) and it’s, “would a $1000 per month send you running for the hills?” This does wonders for me and has allowed me to disqualify deals in 5 minutes that would have drawn weeks of resources just to find out it was a bad fit.

3. Decision Maker

You have to be talking to the decision maker. Your deal is not forecastable if someone needs to check with a spouse or a CFO. They don’t need to be involved in your deal day to day but they must be consulted during the sales process. I am even happy if someone confides in me and states, “look, this maybe just a pricing exercise with no real cash in it for you.” I am happy because now I am doing the person a favor, the deal is staying far from my forecast and I prioritize it as low on the list as I can without appearing to be a jerk.

4. Imminent Event

This is usually something along the lines as a lease is expiring, my contract with the incumbent expires in 2 months and we hate them or something similar. Using an automotive model, “I think my car is on its last leg.” In the IT professional services world, “we are going to be audited in the summer and we want to be prepared.”

5. Time frame

This one is obvious. I am ok with folks looking to do business with me in 2-5 years from today but in order to keep sales healthy, the priority given to these opportunities have to be determined. For some of us, deals may only close every 2-5 years. (Anyone selling satellites out there?!)

-csg