Falling Asleep on the Job
In Ecclesiastes 3:1 we read, “There is an appointed time for everything.” As a sales guy, I know there is a time to talk, a time to shut up and listen, a time to work hard, and a time to play. There is also a time and place for sleeping, and that is after you've turned off the lights and kissed your spouse goodnight, not while working and especially not while leaving a voicemail.
For years my wife and I would turn off the lights and pray together before we went to sleep. More often than not, one of us would be doing some heavy breathing before the last “amen” was given. That's bad enough.
Once I was essentially in this same state of drifting off to sleep while leaving a customer a voicemail message. I sunk into a monotone “voicemail speak” as I left my valued customer a message and instead of closing with, “you can call me back at blah, blah, blah,” I began punctuating the message with, “...in Jesus name we pray...” (I know. What does this say about my prayer life?) I managed to get out the “in Jesus” part, but then I caught myself right as I was about to say “name.” It came out like, “in Jesus nnn...” Pause.
Can you imagine the thoughts that quite literally raced through my mind at the speed of light as I bolted up from falling asleep? All of this taking place in less than a tenth of a second while being recorded!
“In Jesus name!?! I'm about to end a voicemail with 'in Jesus name we pray'!? What is this guy going to think???!! Should I just hang up? Then what will he think?” Panic...
At some point within this tenth of a second, I essentially came to the conclusion that I would rather be thought of as a blasphemer than a cold, orthodox, droning evangelical. I somehow tried to make it sound like something shocked me the listener could not see and that I had exclaimed, “Jesus!” right as I was about to hang up.
I finished the voicemail with something like, “...in Jesus nnn, oh wow! Sorry, I've got to run, I'll call you back!”
In Jeffrey Gitomer's book, “The Little Red Book of Sales Answers,” he writes a short chapter on “What does the voice-mail message I leave say to my customers?” His main counsel is to leave a voicemail message that is focused on the customer in which “you dangle a carrot.” He gives a couple of great examples. (You'll have to go buy the book.)
The only thing I would add to one of my favorite sales authors – that he misses completely! Know exactly what you are going to say in advance in case they don't answer, AND stay awake through the whole message.
Posted at 10:53AM Feb 28, 2009 by George Miller in Personal | Comments[0]
Drunk with Power
Mark's face displayed a combination of shock, horror, and fear. His glance at me revealed that I indeed held his very being in the palm of my hand. I relished the power for a tiny second, then saved his soul with my answer...
Mark Kinkle was a fraternity brother I had invited home with me for the weekend. Clemson University was about a two-hour drive from my home in Waynesville, North Carolina. The shortest way home would take me mostly on two-lane mountain roads, but I had stopped traveling that way during my freshman year, because the curves along with my love for speed combined to give me something on the order of 14,000 miles per set of tires. Mark however was a city-slicker from Louisville, and he wanted to see the mountains so we took the mountain roads.
As we were driving home, I thought I would give Mark a special treat. We would take a short five-mile excursion to visit one of my relatives, John D. Davis, a true Smokey Mountains farmer, who lived with his wife Mary in a small wood-framed farmhouse in Big Ridge, North Carolina. John D. and Mary were country as dirt. He typically wore bib overalls as he worked around the farm. Life Magazine had done a spread on John D. during the 1960s as a feature on the poor Smokey Mountain farmer, showing John D. plowing up a cabbage field with a mule. What the piece did not report was that John D. was also on the board of directors for a bank and probably had the first dime he ever earned.
We pulled up to the house and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. As we were walking off the porch, we heard someone hooting from down the road. We looked and saw John D. and Mary coming toward the house reaching down under the bank over the road, gathering eggs from where their chickens were nesting. John D. hollered for us that they would be right there. As they made their way on the porch John D. greeted me, I introduced Mark, and Mary didn't say a word. John D. invited us in the house into the living room. Mary was still silent.
In the living room there were two easy chairs with arm rests worn from years of service. Next to each easy chair was a large, discolored coffee can. I recognized these cans immediately as spittoons. They fit the setting perfectly to me having grown up chewing tobacco. Mark didn't realize it, but he was standing right next to Mary's spittoon. She stepped over next to him, leaned over the spittoon and slowly spit out a nice long string of black-brown, very dark tobacco juice. She had obviously been saving that one up for a while. Mark's face was frozen. It was petrified with horror. I realized right then, in his city-slicker days, he'd never seen a woman spit like that before.
The first words from Mary's mouth were, “George, are you'ins gonna stay fer dinner?” Suddenly the shock on Mark's face was mixed with fear, and he looked at me, eyes wide... I know how the cat feels when it has a mouse in its paws as a plaything. The slight pause I took to answer Mary must have seemed longer to Mark. I hesitated just long enough to make sure Mark knew that I knew. I looked him in the eyes and smiled. “Mary, we would love to... but Mom's expecting us for dinner. Thanks anyway! We just wanted to stop by and say hello.”
There is a lesson in this story on power. Power can and often does intoxicate those who wield it. This brief experience with power over Mark revealed to me just how much I enjoyed it and the potential of how dangerous this could be. Power needs to be managed carefully with accountability to others. We need to see power as the opportunity to serve others. Matthew 23:11 records Jesus as saying that “the greatest among you will be your servant.” When I look at my sales team, I need to be thinking, “How can I best serve them?” It doesn't mean that I do their jobs for them, but I look at what I can do to help them be successful. When I use my power to make others successful, I've really done my job.
Posted at 08:03AM Feb 25, 2009 by George Miller in Personal | Comments[0]
Three Rules for Selling in Tough Times
Here are three “rules” to live by during tough times and not so tough times. I developed these as reminders for myself back during the dot.com run up (when times were good from a sales guy's perspective), but now they seem more important than ever.
The first one is to remind myself, “Ain't nothing easy.” This is followed by the corollary, “If it was, every body would be doing it, and we'd be getting minimum wage.” I'm not sure my sales reps liked it the first time one of them brought a tough sales problem up to me, and I spouted this phrase out as naturally as breathing, followed by the comment, “and the last time I checked, you weren't getting minimum wage.” That is real motivation there! I should be a motivational speaker...
As with most sales organizations, our challenges in closing a sale are half the time within our own company, half the time due to the competition, and the other half of the time something to do with the customer. None of my sales reps sits by the fax machine waiting for orders the way I used to do. It is called work for a reason, and as the economic conditions continue to worsen, we'll do better the sooner we realize that. There are very few things that are really easy. It takes work.
The second reminder I have is, “Keep kicking the ball up the hill.” This is a metaphor that seems so vivid to me on how to get things done. You want to get the ball over the hill so you kick it. By the time you've taken two or three steps it is rolling back to you and you have to give it another good kick. It may have gone twenty to thirty feet up the hill with the kick, but in reality it is moving in the same relative speed as you are as you make your way up the hill. You just have to keep kicking it till you finally get it over. A lot of things feel like this at work. While I wish others would pick up the ball and run with it, when it comes down to getting something done that is really important to me, I just have to keep kicking till it's over the top.
The third reminder is to keep telling myself that, “Cool heads win the day.” This is probably the hardest one for me. When things don't go the way I want them to go, I'm reminded of things my Chief Master Sergeant used to say, “I'm gonna rip your lips off!” It's surprising that these outbursts don't have the same effect in the civilian world... People get offended when I tell them if they don't do something I'll rip their lips off. This is something I often remember about five minutes too late. What I need to do more, especially when there is a lot of pressure to perform, is to stop before a meeting or before a concall or hitting the send button, and remind myself that cool heads do in fact win the day. Nobody likes to have their lips ripped off.
Posted at 02:30PM Feb 12, 2009 by George Miller in Personal | Comments[0]