A brutal sales territory: as challenging as yours is, this one’s probably worse
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 07, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Today I'm flying over the Kamchatka Peninsula. It's completely covered in snow, with huge Mt. Fuji-shaped volcanic peaks thrusting out of the landscape. Relatively few extol the beauty of Kamchatka because it's not exactly a tourist destination, remote and uncompromising. It looks cold down there, and it reminds me that no matter how bad a grim sales day can be, there are many jobs that are worse than sales. Just ask those miners working 30,000 feet below me.
But then again there are a few really bad sales jobs, too. The story I'm going to tell you is one I sometimes tell in my telesales training classes, to illustrate how good the people I'm training really have it. They say every bad sales territory is salvageable. I'm not sure about this one. You tell me:
My dad's great with people, a natural story teller, and a real nice guy. Despite the fact that he had no college, he was hired as a sales rep for a significant building supplies company. He soon blew out the numbers in his territory, and the president rewarded him by giving him the largest territory in the company, one that had been underperforming for years. With the same success he'd achieved in the smaller territory, he was bound to be successful, right?
That territory was indeed huge, running from Monterey to Santa Barbara, at a time when California's Central Coast was on an unbelievable building boom. Highway 101 was, at that time, 2 lanes wide, one running in each direction. Dad was in the right place at the right time. But guess what? Nobody bought anything. Nobody wanted to talk to him either. He sometimes visited 6 hardware stores per day. No sales. Then he discovered the reason. Before my dad's sales predecessor in the territory had been fired, he'd been stealing significant amounts of supplies from the company warehouse, loading them into his car, taking to the road, then undercutting all competitors by selling his goods for pennies on the dollar. Not only could my honest dad not match the prices, but the buyers knew they'd been receiving stolen goods, so they didn't even want to see him walk in the door. His territory was, in the old military parlance, FUBAR (look it up, families read this blog). He gave it 3 more months, but finally quit the sales business entirely and went into the food business, which he felt was a lot cleaner. Dad was never told, going into the territory, that his customers had been sold stolen goods at barebottom prices, and once the previous rep had been fired, they were probably afraid of crime investigations as well. He had to find out on his own after his "promotion."
So what can we learn and take away from this crazy story of a territory gone bad?
When we're having a bad day, it's sometimes really motivating to get a sense of good things really are. Sure your CRM is slow. Sure marketing could get you more leads. And yes, you may feel your KPIs are unfair. That's when you want to brace up and get back to work, knowing that as bad as things seem, they're probably not bad to the magnitude that my dad's situation was. You're also not a miner in Kamchatka. We all have different ways of motivating ourselves, but reflecting for a moment on people that have things worse than we do is a damn good motivator if you're searching for one. Whatever your situation, you'll have an occasional bad day. So use that bad day to find new ways of thinking out of the box to find new opportunities, make more effective presentations, and do a better job of doing your own marketing to get you some better leads. Creativity is born out of frustration, so use those occasional frustrating days as springboards to thinking of new ways to make your territory more successful. The best salespeople always do.