Building relationships
It's all about relationships.
When I started out as a sales rep in New York in 1984 (!), my friend and colleague, John Motley and I were tasked with creating an inside sales desk. We were to call on customers that were not assigned to sales reps via the telephone and make the sales and support the customers without hitting the streets.
John and I were straight out of the management training program and we were ambitious, eager to make sales.
And so we started calling. It wasn't easy and we learned a lot of lessons. I learned quickly that you don't make promises you can't keep. I learned that those promises we made didn't feel like empty promises - we believed in the product and honestly thought our customers would never be disappointed. We learned that selling a product is about transparency.
Its about relationships. Our customers don't expect us to be perfect all the time. But when things go wrong, they expect us to be there for them, to solve the problem and to go the extra mile.
It didn't take long before John and I started sneaking out of our Broadway office to make sales calls on our customers in midtown - pretty much defying the concept of inside sales. We won business that way - our customers saw us going the extra mile.
We were building relationships. Until our boss got wind of it and reminded us of our job description! But he recognized our initiative, and our willingness to go the extra mile. To define service based on the needs of our customers at the time.
When I started out as a sales rep in New York in 1984 (!), my friend and colleague, John Motley and I were tasked with creating an inside sales desk. We were to call on customers that were not assigned to sales reps via the telephone and make the sales and support the customers without hitting the streets.
John and I were straight out of the management training program and we were ambitious, eager to make sales.
And so we started calling. It wasn't easy and we learned a lot of lessons. I learned quickly that you don't make promises you can't keep. I learned that those promises we made didn't feel like empty promises - we believed in the product and honestly thought our customers would never be disappointed. We learned that selling a product is about transparency.
Its about relationships. Our customers don't expect us to be perfect all the time. But when things go wrong, they expect us to be there for them, to solve the problem and to go the extra mile.
It didn't take long before John and I started sneaking out of our Broadway office to make sales calls on our customers in midtown - pretty much defying the concept of inside sales. We won business that way - our customers saw us going the extra mile.
We were building relationships. Until our boss got wind of it and reminded us of our job description! But he recognized our initiative, and our willingness to go the extra mile. To define service based on the needs of our customers at the time.
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