Friday, June 3, 2016

Who The Heck Are They?

Back in the day when I was making lots of face-to-face calls selling newspaper advertising, I had a very robust list of regular customers that were visited weekly.

These regular customers represented a significant portion of my time consumption and almost all of my business. Admittedly there was very little time devoted to scientifically cultivating new business from this group of customers and almost no time devoted to winning new customers. But that is a subject for another day. 

Since I called on these customers weekly, I saw the familiar faces of the employees that worked at these businesses but were not my contact, so I paid scant attention to them and made almost no effort to foster relationships. That oversight in hindsight was a huge tactical error.

One Monday morning as I was making my regular calls I walked into one of my BIG customers and, as was my flawed-practice, walked right past the assistant manager ( I knew they were the assistant manager because that is what was on their name tag) to the office to meet with the manager.

My, how things had changed over the weekend. The manager had been promoted to a higher position at another location and the afore mentioned assistant manager was now the manager and local decision maker. They had a big portion of my sales goal and my fate in their hands and I knew very little about them!

That was the day I committed to treating everyone that worked for my customers like someone who should be treated with respect and make a sincere effort to get to know them, as time permitted. It wasn't the fact that they might someday hold my selling-success-fate in their hands, it was a realization that everyone is important and should be treated as such.

Because I was in their business so frequently, I was given the opportunity to get to know these individuals and blew the opportunity, up until that shocking point that the assistant manager became the manager.

Take the time to get to know the other people in the room. You just might find some new friends and you will, at the very least, know their names and be in a position where they can get to know you.

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