A - The thing I like most is that I can see myself progressing. At first I felt so inadequate, that I wasn't always regarded as being credible. Here I was, twenty-two years old and talking to these fifty-year-old purchasing agents! After a while, I gained a little bit more confidence, and was able to handle business situations better and more effectively. I always liked meeting the people. It's fun to go out on cold calls, which was always my favorite. I never know who I am going to meet-if they are going to be a "joker" or a great person-or how much business I'd uncover.
I like the challenge. It's a job that changes almost day to day the business as well as the people. It's very rewarding to meet the challenges and realize the goals.
I like the freedom it allows; it gives me a lot of responsibility and a chance to use some creativity. I'm given an opportunity to take over the geographical area and promote the sales in it based on my own skill. I wouldn't like being behind a desk from 9:00 to 5:00.
It's exciting. It's actually fun to go out there and create ideas and incentives for people to buy advertising and to make it work for the client. There's nothing greater than having a client come back and say, "People are pounding down the doors, I can't believe it! You guys are fantastic! Give me another order!"
Q - What do you dislike about your job?
A - I dislike the administrative burden, the need to write reports. That can be very taxing. We are very analytical here, and many times that can take you away from field activities that you ought to be concerned with.
You can go out and do the most fantastic sales job in the world and yet you still have to rely on your inside people, on your inventory and shipping people. If they goof up, you are still the one who's out there, you're the one saying, "I'm really sorry." You're always the one responsible, even if it's not your fault.
The main thing I dislike is that I really don't have that much time to myself. It might be different for a salesperson who has an office, but since I work out of my apartment, what happens is when I get home at night there is an hour or two of work to do. That doesn't bother me as much as getting late phone calls from manufacturers' representatives.
Q - Is there a lot of stress?
A - Some days it's terribly stressful. It sometimes seems over whelming. When I sit in my living room and for ten feet all around me is paper work, I feel a lot of stress. But at those times I just try to get things in the proper perspective.
People can get so caught up in it, they start to suffer physically. I had to sit back at one point and say, "What am I doing? I'm getting five hours sleep a night for two weeks straight. I'm not doing anybody any good working myself like this." But, of course, that pace doesn't last forever.
Q - What kinds of skills do you look for in a good salesperson?
A - The thing I look for in people is maturity. They must deal with people as much as forty years older than themselves, people with a variety of educational backgrounds and experience levels. They have to be self-confident, but not arrogant.
Grades are very important, because they are the only measure indicating how you perform in a given situation. I've heard every reason in the book why grades are not what they should be, and I have a hard time accepting any of those excuses.
Of course I look for a good knowledge of the job. That's something you have to learn in school and through experience; a little bit of both. You have to be a self-starter, initiate things on your own, and not be afraid to call on someone you've never met before and say, "I've got something for you, I'd like five minutes of your time." You've got to like to work with people and be able to handle all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, because you run up against some real strange ones out there.
I would say two important ones: First, computer skills and, second, communications, interactive communications, like interpersonal communications and public speaking. I didn't have any computer classes at all. I didn't even know what a computer looked like. That hurt me at first, but they do a very thorough job of teaching you here, so it wasn't essential. But it certainly would have helped.
Take finance, statistics, and accounting, courses of that nature that help you sharpen your analytical skills. You're constantly going to be dealing with figures and analyzing situations, and courses such as these help those skills.
You are individually responsible for a tremendous amount of assets for the company in a given area. That's a lot of responsibility. If you're going to be a salesperson, you must be flexible and be able to handle a variety of situations. You've got to be responsible and be able to schedule yourself and get things accomplished. There are people who can't handle the constant variety of things that happen, the demands of the job. Those people need to be in a structured environment where they work a certain number of hours a week and know what those hours are going to be.
The fact that the products are very similar means there is a great amount of competition among suppliers. If you don't close the sale, someone else will. It's as simple as that. Cold calls are a fact of life in sales, but in this category the cold call will probably be to someone who already has service with another company, and it's up to you to convince them that yours is better. It is much easier to maintain good relationships with clients and keep their business, than it is to try to get. Customers to change their loyalty from some other company. Easier, but not automatic. Once you have the business, you had better work hard a keeping it.
