misterco-blog

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All Work & No Play Makes Me Lose My S***

To honor the fact that I have started this blog in a direction related to my career, today I find it equally important to honor what makes the career side of things tolerable - play.

I am 34 years old, but I've never outgrown my love of playing. As a child it involved a lot of imaginative games and sports and bike riding. As an "adult" (if you've met me you understand the quotations), play has transformed into a number or different pursuits; discovering and plowing through seasons of TV shows, watching movies and documentaries, collecting and reading comic books, playing sudoku and scouring ebay for classic Transformers toys and off beat t-shirts. These are just gravy. My favorite form of playing is music.

I started playing the guitar at 17 when I received an acoustic for Christmas. You hear it a lot, but I literally did play until my fingers bled. I bought a couple of beginner's books, one that showed chord formations and another that taught basic tunes like "Mary had a little lamb".

As soon as I got home from school, I'd play the Foo Fighters first cd (remember those?) on my little RCA ghetto blaster. Guitar in hand, I'd sit down on my bed and pick apart songs. Then I'd grab the chord book to figure out the chords related to the bass notes and I'd play along. A single song would take hours to decipher, and even once I figured it out I was so bad at chord transitions that I couldn't even play what I'd discovered - which pushed me further forward. Thinking back, it's amazing I had such patience, because even now I am not a patient person. As an adolescent this was doubly true.

Within a few months I'd bought a cheap Squier Stratocaster from a pawn shop. I also bought the greatest distortion pedal this world has ever known, called the ProCo RAT, from this hilarious dude I knew who played in a strange indie band. By this point I was in deep and my parents were subjected to endless nights of chunky (poorly played) guitar riffs coming from our basement.

In terms of musical technology and timing I was ridiculously fortunate. As I got a bit older and my musical tastes expanded, I wanted to be more involved in different areas of music creation - creating drum beats, using synthesizers and playing piano. Using a yellowed and cranky hand me down computer I started programming beats using a demo version of Fruity Loops (now all grown up and referred to as FL Studio), then I'd dump tracks down to my Yamaha 4-track and layer with guitar and piano. This was around 2001.

More and more I moved away from physically playing instruments and became very heavily involved in programming, arranging and sampling - right up until about a year ago. Due to the fact that I've become more "career-oriented" (yawn), the creative side of me has taken a back seat. There is no bitterness, though; I spent a solid 7-8 years of my life trying to make a serious go of it in music, and at the end of the day realized that I just didn't have "it". That doesn't mean that I can't still love playing.

This past winter we took a drive down to Long & McQuade on a rainy Sunday afternoon and walked into the bass guitar section. I'd never owned a bass, but had always had a natural touch for the instrument. There were immediately two guitars that struck my eye; one a Fender Jazzmaster with a natural stained finish, another a candy apple red Jaguar Bass with a black pick guard. As soon as I played the Jag, I knew I'd found my guy.

Now everything has come right back to where I started musically. It isn't my bedroom, but is now my home office. I completely lose myself by plugging in, putting on my headphones, and playing along with different music for hours on end. I get tingles, I sweat like crazy and I unconsciously dance around like a lunatic.

To me it's awesome that I have this relationship in my life where I can entirely disconnect from everything around me and just go into a pure place where there is a singular focus. It is hands down the closest I get to meditation, to a place without problems to solve, without linguistic thought, or disturbances, or ego.

I just play.

-MrCO-

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The Hook

There's a careful art to cold calling and meeting with a customer who is unfamiliar with what you do. An art that I am very far from having mastered.

If you've ever worked in or around sales, you've likely heard the adage "It's a numbers game". This is entirely true, however I am quickly learning that you can't simply keep making call after call for the sake of doing it, you need to captivate and engage. You need to get people on the hook.

Whether or not any salesperson wants or likes to admit it, there is subtle manipulation involved in getting people to listen and have a conversation. Don't think for a second that I'm talking about lying to people, or promising the impossible - but you have to figure out a way to apply what you provide to what they need, and you have to do it fast or you're going to hear more than your fair share of dial tones, usually mid-sentence.

The first challenge is getting the right person on the phone. The truth is, in at least 80% of the calls I make I don't even speak to the person I need to get in contact with. Once you get them, that's where the pitch starts.

When I started out, here's what I was doing:

"Hi this is --- from ---, have I caught you at a bad time?"

This is a relatively disarming and low-pressure approach to getting them to allow you to talk for 15 -30 seconds, and because you're asking if it's a bad time they'll usually say no. Generally because their brain already knows it's a salesperson and their inner dialogue is screaming NO!!!

Once in the door I would throw together a quick rundown of what we do and would ask them if they're familiar with us. I lost a lot of people here. "Oh no, we're not interested." Dial tone.

First mistake, and one that I've turned around now. I do a bit of research in advance and try to get an understanding of what some of the challenges of this customer might be. Also, if you've worked with a business they're familiar with you'll score BIG points and draw interest as soon as you name drop. I tie all of this into a quick summary of what we do, usually in about 15 - 20 seconds. It's best to try to end with a no-brainer question that allows the conversation to move forward, such as:

"When you purchased widgets in the past, did it upset the flow of your business when something went wrong with your widget?"

Duh, of course it did. And now you've got buy in, because you've got a solution to their widget problem.

This is the traction point, and if you know your product and encourage the right kind of conversation with the right questions, you're off to the races. I always try to get a dialogue going by asking open ended questions, then just letting the customer tell me all about what they think. Here are a few examples:

"If you don't mind me asking, why is it that you feel that way?"

"With your business, what are you most proud of?"

"With regard to your (insert service you provide here), what would you change if you could change anything?"

In all of this, the key is to get them to talk, but first you have to engage. This is what I am learning on a daily - if not hourly - basis. I most definitely do not have it down to a science, it's a fluid process that I finesse and refine daily. I have to say that I do enjoy it, and once I figure out these little tricks and they work I get genuine satisfaction from it - because I've made my life easier.

Comments, ideas, questions or suggestions? Throw them my way!

We'll do it all again tomorrow . . .

-Mr.CO-

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WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

I was probably about two years old. I am on the second floor of our house, looking down the hall toward a window which overlooks the front yard. My crib is to the left of the window, and in front of the window is a puzzle box with Kermit the frog on the front of it.

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Birth of a Salesman

As a child I had a clear idea of what salespeople were; aggressive, slimy people who were out to take advantage of you. They roamed door-to-door, preying on those who were overly friendly, or were just plain suckers. I held this idea even though my own step father was a salesperson for a natural gas supplier, selling furnaces, hot water heaters and air conditioners.

As a teenager and into my early 20's, I was even more fervent with this attitude. To me, sales was a lowly profession reserved for bottom feeders with slick hair and cheap suits, people who lacked integrity and only cared about bamboozling good people out of their hard earned money.

Fast forward another 10 years or so, and I find myself in the situation I have been in for the past 14 months:

I am a salesman.

How did this happen? I spent the better part of my 20's chasing after a music career that never took off (think of a bass player trying to conduct a symphony). During this time I held over 30 jobs - labor jobs in factories and landscaping, telemarketing (only when I was really broke), telephone surveying (yeah, I was that guy), retail sales and cooking and serving in restaurants. I've probably worked about every crappy minimum-wage job you can.

At 27 I went to a temp agency; I had an affinity for computers and have always been a strong communicator. After years of job hopping with weird hours and uneven schedules I decided that I wanted a Monday to Friday 9 to 5 job. It was time to get a "real" job, and to me that meant desk jockeying.

I was able to land a job with a company as a bilingual customer service rep. I took advantage of the opportunity, and 5 years later I'd been promoted 4 times and had been moved across the country. I was now in account management, and was taking care of the day to day account operations of a handful of major companies. At that point, and in that industry, it became clear that the next logical step for me was to move into sales.

My opinion of salespeople had evolved by this time. There were definitely the ones who got by on lofty promises and (iffy) charisma, but there were the ones who genuinely cared about the customer and who were inspired to help their clients with the product or service they provided. I was lucky enough to be mentored by someone like that. In fact, he was so relationship driven - and so good at developing relationships - that the business portion was almost secondary, an afterthought.

Last April I took my first true outside sales job as a B2B rep. The job was a perfect segue in my career, as it involved the ongoing maintenance and management of accounts, while simultaneously developing and going after new business.

I need to make something clear: I have never been a "hunter". In sales there are generally two schools of thought and definitions for types of selling. Hunters are aggressive - they hit the pavement, make tons of cold calls and develop new business from the ground up. The other segment (where I used to firmly stand) is farming. Farmers tend to ongoing business and accounts, organically developing and expanding the business through relationships and "down the hall" strategies.

Around November of 2011, I started to become bored with what I was doing and the industry I was in, and I took it upon myself to start learning about social media marketing, the brave new world of advertising and Web 2.0. I even enrolled in a local college and started taking classes toward a certificate in social media marketing and marketing management.

In May of this year a huge opportunity presented itself, and I took a new position as an outside rep with a web based company who provide marketing and advertising services to businesses. From that point forward I have been thrown head first into the world of hunting, hence the title of this blog.

All apprehensions have been forced out, there is no place for them here. Proactivity and momentum are vital. I am learning to adopt an attitude that is not only foreign, but that I once detested. I am a salesman.

My idea for this blog is to put down what I learn from day to day from a sort of conceptual perspective, to share these experiences as I attempt to get a grip on what the hell it is I do.

I won't always write about sales because that's just super boring. I am really interested in comics and film and TV and music, so some of that will likely bleed into here as well.

As this is an open forum I invite you to provide me with your thoughts, insights and questions as well. We'll do it again tomorrow . . .

MisterCO