Question - How did you get into sales?
Answer: I got into sales directly from college. I was recommended by a counselor in school, they called me, set up an interview, eventually gave me a job offer, and I took it.
Mine was the typical sob story. When I graduated from college, a good business school, I had a 3.0 grade point average and no job, along with the rest of the marketing majors. I was in my dentist's office one day, and in came a sales representative from a company that I had missed on campus (for some reason I wasn't able to get on the schedule). I grabbed the sales representative, and he put me in contact with one of the managers. After that, I harassed them for weeks and months and barraged them with letters and phone calls until they finally called me and said there was a training position open if I was interested. Later I found that it was my tenacity that secured me the position.
I am responsible for the overall sales of surgical products within my area, six states. That includes measuring and following the case volume, training the people who work for me, handling recruiting activity, analyzing the business, responding to questions, and on and on. I have a personal account that I call on. I also work with my sales representatives in the field. For example, we may call on a key account together or maybe just a normal routine call for training purposes. We are responsible for reporting to the home office about what business activity we currently have, what hospitals are looking at our product, what hospitals have been closed this week or this month, what hospitals we expect to close in the next one or two months, how much volume a hospital is bringing in, what our customer status is, how we are accelerating in certain lines, and on and on the list continues.
Question - What would an average day be like?
Answer: You are really on your own. You take an account listing and figure out where the accounts are, you plot them out, and then try and prioritize them according to how much they are worth. Monday morning you sit down and call these places to make appointments, if necessary. You choose the products you want to emphasize that week, you get in your car with all your files and whatever you need, and you call on the different clients. At night there is a lot of work, because you have to go over what you did that day, fill out forms, and look up things that people asked about. You are really on your own, you are your own little business. You get a ton of mail. Most people like mail, but Fm starting to hate it.
I'm on the road by 8:00 or 8:30. I'll make between thirteen t< thirty-six calls a day. An average call is usually fifteen to twenty minute: long but can range from thirty seconds to an hour, so you have to plar your key account calls closely around that.
A thirty-second call goes like this: "Hello, I'm so-and-so from so-and-so. How are you this morning?" They say, "Fine, we don't need anything." I say, "I've got something to leave for the doctor. Thank you.' And you walk out the door. For an average call, the first thing I do is always remind them of my name and who I represent. I always try to have something tangible in my hand, like a pamphlet or a new product with our name on it. I try to make conversation, the weather, anything at all. It helps to know the receptionists' names. If they're busy, you don't take up their time; if they just hand me a list, I don't try to sell them something. I say, "Fine," take the list, and say, "I'll see you in two weeks, if you need anything, call." Other times the doctors want to sit and talk, and that's fine too.
Actual selling time is no more than 10 to 15 percent of my day. Another 30 percent is talking to doctors about new products. I'd say another 30 percent is travel time. The remainder is spent at home doing work. I have an office set up in my home.
Question - How much time do you spend on the job?
Answer: It's hard to believe, but consistently between sixty and sixty-five hours a week. And I would say when I was a marketing representative, very seldom less than fifty, and consistently between fifty and sixty. I think you will find this true in sales. Very rarely is your week less than forty or forty-five hours long. There's always things to do. You are your own boss, setting your own time schedule and accomplishing the things you want to accomplish.
Marketing representatives here work a lot of weekends and evenings, but they also take a lot of afternoons off. I think it balances out to forty hours a week.
Question - How and by whom are you evaluated?
Answer: We are a "management by objectives" company. You as an individual establish your own goals with your immediate supervisor, the district sales manager. Those goals involve your sales responsibility and your administrative responsibility. You are evaluated at informal monthly meetings, and then at least once a year, you are formally evaluated based on those goals.
In the formal review, we look at what has happened in your territory both in sales and administration. It's a give-and-take situation. You are evaluated, but you also have a chance to interject anything you feel is pertinent to your territory. There may have been something very unusual that happened during the year that you felt either helped or hampered you reaching your goals.
