Answer - I am my own time manager, my own section manager. I just graduated last year, and I was given a lot of responsibility for being straight out of college. My unit manager lets me run my section the way I want to run it, the way I feel is most effective. He gives me certain guidelines, but the ultimate decisions are mine, and the ultimate responsibility is mine.
? I think there is a great deal of satisfaction that salespeople come out with each day. They are out in the field, and there is no one looking over their shoulder. They are going to get up and do it. It is totally up to them. They have made that preparation, they've gotten up, they have made that call, they've built the relationships, and they are following up on what they have said. Their work becomes a very salable commodity in itself. Buyers know which salespeople they can depend on to follow through. At the same time they know which ones are giving them a straight story and aren't just out for a quick dollar and that's the end of it. At the end of the day, they can sit down and say, "I really accomplished something today!"
Question - What do you dislike about this type of sales?
Answer - I mean, some people will just chew me up one side and down the other. It's been building up in them and if they get it out, they feel better. I kind of sit back and try to be very constructive and make it look like they're going to win, even though I'm going to win too. I have one customer who won't give me an order. He knows I come in wanting an order, and I know he'll give me one, but he won't give it to me while I'm there in the store and he does it just to "get" me. But I don't let it bother me as long as I get it eventually. That's fine with me. He always wants to win or feel that he's won, so every time I go in there, I always make sure he looks like he's coming out on top. I'm going to come out on top too, but he just doesn't realize it. I sometimes have to play a game with them.
Probably one of the negative aspects of sales is that many times you have to get yourself started. You have to have a lot of belief in yourself, because there are a lot of people who are not going to believe what you are going to tell them, and you might hit ten of those people in a row. If you don't have it in yourself to say, "Hey, look, what went wrong? Maybe it's my approach. Maybe I'm not looking at it in the right might to get my message across to this guy," you can go down in the doldrums real quick. You have to be able to get yourself back up and get out and sell. At times it can be extremely tough.
I don't like all the extra paper work I have to do at night, on my own time. It cuts into a lot of my free time. If you had a family, I'm jingle so I'm lucky, it doesn't bother me so much. There always seems to ale something to do. I never have the job done so completely that I don't have something else that could be done. That's kind of a pain. I think about what I could be doing at night. Sometimes I'm just too tired to do it. The traveling gets old very fast. I mean real fast. You've heard the stories, it's the pits. Well, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. In the summer it's not so bad. In the winter, you get into these small towns at night, and there isn't anything to do. You can read or something like that. You always have paper work to do, so you do your paper work and go to bed. That's no good. You don't have any time to do anything else. Because of the travel, I feel like I own a part of the company.
I hated being a sales representative! It was the worst! It's a job that in some respects might be an insult to your intelligence. You don't get to use your mind that often. It's pretty much all there in front of you, and all you have to do is utilize what they give you. You don't get to use your own imagination, you don't get to ask on your own, and there's not a lot of autonomy. Whereas with this job (district sales manager), I'm totally on my own, and I have no one telling me what to do. It's my ball game, and if I blow it, it's my fault and no one else's.
A lot of my buyers never even had a woman call on them. When I go to headquarters, there may be fifty men in the waiting room and me. That's difficult. It takes time to adjust and to learn how to handle that situation. It's got its ups and downs. There are times when I wish I were a neuter.
The worst thing is that the job is so demanding on my personal life. If I didn't have an extremely understanding husband, I could never have this job. Even if it went the other way and it was my husband who had the job, he'd better have an extremely understanding wife. Because of the time, you have to be willing to give up a lot of things. I used to have a lot of hobbies and interests. Well, they had to go by the wayside. It was one or the other.
Question - How stressful is your position?
Answer - The length of time we work is stressful. For me, it's the driving. It gets tiring after awhile. More specifically, there is pressure to reach the objectives. We are always given objectives for whatever we sell, and there's a great incentive to make these objectives. Personally I go out to do the best job I can. If I sell twice as much as my objective, that's great, but if I sell half as much, then I still know I did the best job I could. Maybe there were other factors that were involved that the person who set my objective didn't take into consideration. I have only had one night when I didn't sleep too well because I didn't think I was going to meet my objective. I don't let it bother me. Now some salespeople let it get t them. They are always saying, "Gosh! I'm only 95 percent of what I'm supposed to be!" But you know if you go out and do the best job that you can, sometimes you are going to do well and sometimes you're not. You can't let it bother you.
