Time to Start!

For the past year I have been seeking a way to communicate my thoughts and experiences in a timely and effective way. As a regional sales manager for a large wholesale distributor, I travel most days of the month. Most weeks something comes up or I read an article that I would like to get to our sales team to teach and inspire.

Email would be a timely way to get the information to our team but is not as effective as in person discussions. Waiting for weeks until I can make it to  their location would be more effective but is certainly not timely. Email would also limit the discussion to those within my circle of co-workers and friends. In person training would further limit my reach to only co-workers and friends that I actually see.

So it is my hope that this blog site will be both timely and effective. I believe the topics and discussions I’m sharing will be interesting and beneficial to more than those I currently know.

Sales Managers, no matter what industry or products, have much in common. We must:

• Prioritize our efforts
• Create a sales process that is effective and repeatable
• Focus and target our energies
• Maintain and cultivate new and existing customers and products
• Repeat, repeat, repeat

The list above I believe are the basics and have been proven over time to be the skills we as sales managers work with our sales teams to learn and improve upon.

I have attended many sales seminars and worked with several national sales trainers and it seems these are the consistent topics. They may call it:

• Time management
• Sales cycle
• Show a target with an arrow in the center
• Prospect
• Do all over again

The challenge we all have is how to adapt the basics, which have in the past proven to be successful,  to a quickly changing sales environment. We must now adapt our training to a younger sales team that has vastly different sets of skills than the sales team of just a few years ago.

We must also focus on teaching our existing sales team how to sell into a changing market that expects more than product knowledge and a lunch every once in a while.

Those who can find a way to meld the old with the new will have the greatest success and most enjoyment.

So here we go stepping into a new and exciting adventure called blogging. I welcome your comments and suggestions. I don’t have all the answers. Heck, some days I feel I have no answers. How about you!