COVID19 "Remote Working" Day One Hundred and Three of Selling
I was so angry that I took my the mug of coffee that was at my desk and starting beating the crap out of my notebook. I must have smashed it twenty times, by the time I was finished I had completely destroyed my notebook. All I could think of, is what did I just do, this notebook isn't even mine. How the heck am I going to explain this to my company? I thought about blaming the dog, I then thought maybe the cat, maybe I could say I dropped it, or maybe I ran it over. Clearly I needed to get out of this mess and blame something or someone. Seems I knew just how to solve the problem because it was then that I woke up.
I thought a lot about that dream from Thursday night, probably more than I've ever though about any of my dreams. The need to blame someone else for my lack of responsibility to destroy something or destroy myself then grew some legs when I thought about selling.
How many salespeople put the blame on things that happen with events or people when they aren't selling? How many look for reasons that they can use that makes everything all right because they didn't do their job for the last month or quarter. Whether it's a week with out power or my dog died too many times we look for reasons why we did not achieve our goals. In most cases the reasons we don't succeed is because we didn't put in the effort to make ourselves successful.
In most cases there are no excuses, you're late to a meeting because you didn't have a plan. People need to plan for the "what ifs" in life. If your plan was to arrive on time you would have thought what happens if there's an accident, what happens if there is mega traffic? Those "what's ifs" need to be a daily part of your plan if you're going to be successful. Hard to believe that all of that came out of one 30 second dream.
I haven't written much in the last three days and that's because there hasn't been much to write about. I'm still sitting at a little above $70K for the month with still 50% of the month left. My plan is to try and get to $100K with continued prospecting via email and selected calls.
I had two decent opportunities that got hot at the start of last week, however both have cooled. On Friday one of my other opportunities boiled over and seems like they are ready to move forward with two A3 color devices. I have that meeting at 11AM tomorrow. I already did the work and have the spreadsheets ready for the questions that may come. Right, having a plan for the phone call and having everything ready can hope move the opportunity closer to closing.
Other than that it's a couple of appointments this week with nothing large on the horizon. Most seems to be ignoring emails and calls until when they are ready to connect. One account today finally got back to me after 8 emails and 5 calls to the client that went unanswered. I'm grateful that I finally had some interaction, but I also know that it's just not us sales people that are stressed. We are all stressed with the actions of COVID19, buyers and sellers alike.
Just an update on my lead service that instituted about three weeks ago. I received ten leads so far. Six of them were crap and I got them credited, thus out of the four I was able to generate three meetings (all virtual). One lead stated her husband bought something else. one I'm still tracking and the other two were lost on price. The loss on price was for hardware. Thus at this point I'm not sure if I'm going to continue, probably give it another week or so.
This week also means I'll be sending my email campaign to a list of 900 or so net new account list. This week I'm trying something new, instead of generating four pieces of content, I'm only doing three. The other piece of content is coming from another company outside of the imaging industry. I thought it would be good to diversify the content. The idea came from a meeting I had last week with a net new suspect that's in the payroll business. The thought of me offering to help share the wealth with that VP went over really well. You know sometimes it's more about planting the seeds and then doing all that work so you can reap the harvest when it comes it. I've never ever been shy of hard work.
-=Good Selling=-
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