Here is a little story to show why I understand where you are.
I had just moved to North Carolina. I was going to get an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in the executive program (the evening program) because I was married with 2 children so I had to work full time to make this dream come true. The previous year was my first year in sales and it was a disaster. I had learned a lot about selling and how to work so I was able to set up several interviews and had 3 companies offer me job offers before relocating to Raleigh.
I took a job with one company that sounded like it had a lot of upside. They were owned by a larger company, Global Imaging Systems, and there was a lot of growth and new sales opportunities with the company. Shortly after arriving at the company, I learned things were very different that the image they had portrayed in the interview process and online. My first day on the job, I had a sale, but I couldn’t get the product delivered because they didn’t have a delivery truck. Not a great sign. They had an old beater van that wasn’t big enough to deliver the copier I had sold.
Things went from bad to worse. After settling in and starting to get some traction in my sales career, a medical issue came up in my family. My first born son was diagnosed with Autism. It was a word that I had not heard before and I didn’t know anyone with that disability. The following months were full of sleepless nights, long therapy sessions, and money flowing out of my bank account. Then Global Imaging Systems was purchased by Xerox. The once promising job opportunity in a new city turned into a nightmare and all new hires were fired.
There I was, thousands of miles from friends and family, a 2 year old diagnosed with autism, a 6 month old baby, and I was fired. I really started to think that no one could make money in sales. All the people I had worked with had been broke, so how was my life going to be any different.
I started to look around and thought about leaving the sales profession and getting a regular job. I just couldn’t stand the thought that I had failed at something and I was going to have to live with that failure all of my life.
Decision time. I decided that I could find another sales job and be successful and then go find another job. That way, I would go out on top and not a failure that had been fired. So, I took a little time and made a few choices that would end up paying off big in the long run.
The first choice I made was to sell something I believed in and that I could make money selling. I decided to go into financial services because I believed in the product. A few years earlier, my father had passed away and had it not been for the life insurance he had, my mom would have lost her husband, house, sanity, and children all at once. The life insurance allowed my mom to pay off her house, keep the bills covered, and she was able to keep working the same job and didn’t need to take on another job. I could finish college because I didn’t have to get another full time job to cover bills. The family survived because of that life insurance.
The second decision I made was to leave the mom and pop companies behind and went to work for a Fortune 500 company. There were too many politics and instability in small business. If you want all the drama of a small business, start your own, don’t work for one.
The last decision I made was to trust my instincts, and to stop listening to all the bad sales advice that was out there. Sales is an art and a science. Most people teach one or the other but they don’t understand both so they can’t teach you the complete process. I did things differently that the other people I worked with and that gave me different results than everyone else, most of the time those results were great, sometimes they were not. But I kept improving my craft until I was successful. And by that time, I didn’t want to leave the business. I was having too much fun.
I have worked for many household names,
Cannon Ricoh Xerox New York Life AT&T
and Apple
just to name drop a few places. With each company came more success, more sales, more fun, and more opportunities to teach others. I stepped out on my own and ran a consulting company and then it when I founded the Sales Consulting Services dedicated to helping businesses land their dream customers while reducing their workload.
I hope you gain tremendous insights from our information.
Good Luck and great selling.
Sincerely,
James – Managing Partner Sales Consulting Services