A toast to a past job
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 24, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Every time I teach one of my insides sales courses, one of the first things I do is ask what the folks in the room did prior to becoming inside sales people. Not only does this help me to know them better, but when we get to the part of the course where we talk about the importance of knowing the prospect's business, I can link it back to some expertise in business areas that the reps, in many cases, had forgotten they had. We're all experts in something related to business, and the kinds of questions I ask the reps, they can in turn ask to their prospects. Asking great business questions is often as simple as simply being interested.
A few of my past jobs generally surface as part of the class, too. I thought about one of them this week, because I read Brother Korte's obituary in the newspaper. I worked for Brother Korte at the Novitiate Winery in Los Gatos, CA one summer. He was a marketing genius that took the Jesuit's altar wine business, evolved it to the next step, and began winning awards at wine festivals. Brother Korte made ads for the winery's Ruby Cabernet, showing him in his priest's garb with the tag line "a devilishly good wine."
This was the early 1980s. I had just cooked up a deal with the military where I would be inducted as an officer to run a radio station in Europe (I'd done a lot of radio, and it was a good fit). But this was June, and induction would take place in August, so I'd need a summer job. I wanted a manual labor job to beef up before boot camp, so signed on at the Novitiate to work on the bottling line, which consisted of dumping empty bottles on the conveyor belt on one end, then sealing full boxes of wine and stacking a pallet with them on the other. At the end of each shift, every worker got a bottle of what was bottled that day. It was idyllic. The winery was in an old building in the mountains, and my co-workers and the priests for whom we worked were terrific. We had lunch at a picnic table overlooking all of Santa Clara Valley. A few years later, the Novitiate went out of the wine business, so it's all history now.
So I took an afternoon off last week to pay my respects to Brother Korte. None of the people I remembered from my days on the bottling line were at the memorial, so I drove up the mountain for the first time since the 80s, to visit what was left of the winery. A new concern has taken over, but the tasting room host walked me back to where I'd worked. Fresh bottles were coming off the new bottling line, but the old tanks were still there, still being used, and the place smelled wonderful, just like it had when I'd worked there.
As a young man working on a bottling line, I couldn't have guessed that a couple of decades later, I'd have achieved a lot of success in the business of inside sales. Inside sales is a career to which no one aspires in high school. We end up there by accident. For many, it's a way stop, then all of a sudden, it becomes fun, we make a good amount of money, and we realize we didn't find a career, it found us.
Although it was only a summer job, it stuck with me, and most months, I still think of it once or twice, because I do think that it contributed in its own way to what I was able to accomplish in inside sales, in terms of the value of doing one's job as perfectly as possible. And whenever I made an inside sales call to a company in the wine business, I mentioned my time on the bottling line, and it really broke the ice. Most wine execs have worked on the bottling line at one time too, as it turned out.
I'll bet you have one or two of those jobs in your past, too. When you're making a high level call to an exec in a field in which you've worked, mentioning it will turn a cold call into a warm one, I assure you. As I said before, engaging in business discussions with your prospects is critically important, particularly in enterprise sales where ROI is invariably a big part of the decision and sign-off process. It's as simple as simply being interested.