Day 5 - Distractions!!!

Friday, January 8th, 2010

There are so many distractions to selling in today's work environment. Some of them are nearly impossible to avoid - like actual operations work. My company is pretty small - there are 15 full time employees total and a bunch of independent contractors that do or don't work for us on any given day. Our lean, mean, transportation machine makes it so many of us need to double dip on our responsibilities.

We recently had to lay off our inventory control specialist since that portion of the business has been in such steep decline. Since I'm the guy who developed the inventory control software, those responsibilities naturally fall into my lap. I'll be training someone from the dispatch department next week, but in the meantime, I'm the sales department and the inventory control department! No big deal, but I really do my best work when I can stay focused on one thing at a time.

I think we give ourselves a lot of excuses to not stay focused on one thing, and really what we're doing is giving ourselves excuses to not be good sales people. I'm coming in early during this double-duty period to try to get all the operations stuff done before 9am so I can dedicate the majority of my work day to actual sales work.

Day One of a Year of Sales

2009 was an interesting year for me as a small business owner and salesman. It was my first year of sales ever after spending the rest of my 7 years since college as an operations guy in three different fields.

There's a huge difference between the mindset of an operations guy and a sales guy. When I was an operations guy, I was 100% task oriented (sometimes to the dismay of my staff!) and results were judged by how much stuff you got done. As a sales guy, I have to be much more relational and friendly. Results are based on how much revenue you're bringing in to the company. A lot of the factors that determine whether or not you will get a new customer to bring in revenue are outside of your control though. Are they happy with their current vendor? Can you do the business for a better rate? Is your competitor the vice presidents brother in law? The one thing you can control is how often you put yourself in front of the customer so maybe if one of those uncontrollable factors changes, you're the person they think of first.

That's what this year is about for me. I'm going to put myself in front of and on the phone with as many people as possible and see what the difference is between 2010 and 2009, where I was still half-way sales and half-way operations.

This could be really awesome - or could really suck!