A New Career Path

A New Career Path

In January of 1964 we were blessed with a second beautiful daughter Patricia. Patti as she is known. This event set into motion some serious thought about work verses family. I came to realize that the last two years I was not there for the development of my children or the personal support I should be providing them and my wife. I began to start searching for a new career.

This led me to taking a position as sales trainee for Xerox Corporation. At this time in the history of Xerox they had only one desktop copier. In the brief two years that I worked for Xerox three new duplicator products were released. The first thirty days of my career with Xerox was spent in training. For the first week I learned product information and demonstration techniques. I then spent the next few weeks with a very interesting mentor in the field. My mentor and field trainer was the top salesman in the branch. Interestingly he was the son of the secretary of the original founder and developer of the Xerox copier company. He brought the Haloids photo coping process into the broad commercial market. Bill’s mother agreed to work for stock instead of salary for the first year of the company and of course became a millionaire.

Bill had great instinctive sales skills and I learned a lot. We would put the domo copier in our car and take it to prospective customers. The technique was the old dog food trick. We would wheel in the system and try to get an audience with the boss. In many cases we ended up dealing with the receptionist or the bosses secretary. In any case we would offer the leave the system for them to use for a day or two and then return to get their reaction. Our success rate with this approach was over 40%. Obviously the dogs loved the dog food. It was then fairly easy to justify the cost verses carbon paper or typing multiple copies.

I learned several valuable lessons from Bill about selling.

I was then given my own territory, which consisted of an area of small businesses in southwest Columbus and then two counties southeast of Columbus. It was relatively virgin territory so I had plenty of opportunity for success. I was able to achieve enough success to get the attention of our branch manager. I along with my mentor Bill were two of the first salespeople in our branch to be selected to go to a national training school in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida for the companies new 2400 ‘copier/duplicator system. Here we learned professional selling techniques and office systems philosophies.

When we returned I was made Marketing Team Manager with 5 salespeople reporting to me. I held this position for 6 months. Bill helped me a lot with my new team, even though he was not part of my team. He was always interested in how it was going and had great advice. I recall one episode in particular. I had a new salesman who was fantastic in training and very polished but had not closed an order in the first month of his territory assignment. I asked Bill for his advice and he suggested traveling with my new salesman for a day or two and observing his sales technique. I called Bill after the first day and said he performed great but was still not able to close. Bill gave me another lesson in closing a sale.

Ask for the order and shut up!!! I light went off in my head and I realized that my new salesman could not stop talking. The next day I instructed him to do his sales presentation, ask for the order, and not say another word until I spoke. On the first call after about a minute of silence, the prospect said no because he was going on vacation and did not want to start anything new until he returned. We waited for about 3 minutes in silence while the prospect carried out his own internal conversation and finally said yes. It seemed like an eternity. With great joy I said thank you, told him we would deliver the equipment and train his staff in the next 48 hours and we left. After that experience my new salesman became a star and eventually ended up on the national Xerox training staff.

This first 7 months led to another great opportunity and a challenge, both of which I will talk about in the next chapter. I should also mention that Bill continued to be interested in my career progress even after I left Xerox.

Lessons learned,

1. Become an expert in your products or systems as soon as possible.

2. The principles of good selling work. Get their attention, solve a problem, describe your products benefits in the customer’s terms, help make it the prospects decision, and ask for the order. Then shut up.

3. A negative answer to a question is an opportunity to develop a better understanding of your products benefits.

4. The cold calling process helps you learn what works and what does not work in developing real opportunities.

5. How to identify and find the real decision maker.

6. How to motivate sales people.

7. The value of having a cheerleader at home when things are not going well.