Water Under the Bridge

Okay I have to come clean after being called out by an alert reader. I left out two events unique to myself at a sales kickoff. So in the interest of surfacing repressed memories here goes; I spilled a bottle of Corona on the wife of the then CEO soaking her whomptillion dollar silk shawl. The upside of this was she handled this with grace and aplomb and I was not fired. The CEO did joke after she got back from cleaning up, “So what did you do after you worked at (withheld) ?” Second was during the sales award ceremony I was called up as one of the top 3 reps (I was #3 out of 150) to receive my award. This company was bit different as there were many more (about 2 to 1) saleswomen then men. The VP of WW Operations was taking a wide interpretation of the obligatory handshake and kissing all the women on the cheek. So when I accepted my award, yes, I planted one on his cheek. That got the crowd going. The net result? I was promoted. Also the CEO would send me notes via internal company m

Perhaps nothing strikes fear in the hearts of sales professional like the weekly, ahem, interactive sales call. Having run hundreds and sat in on thousands more of these here is a (partial and edited) list of what sales people want and don’t want culled from only the intelligent survey responses of the sales animal; Do not make everyone sit through everyone else’s pipeline. This is number one by at least three lengths. What happens? The sales people not reviewing pipeline go off line until they are called. They IM, email, and even take other calls. I have seen these call run two hours, arguably 5% of a sales person time during the week where they could otherwise be in front of customers persuading them to buy. Far and away the reply to the pipeline type calls is; waste of time. Second? Do not schedule a one on one for more than 50 minutes. In fact a (typical) 90 minute one on one to review pipeline is an additional 3.75% of a sales persons time to review what in some cases was already