Many years ago, a dear friend of mine got their first sales job. I won’t name the company, but they were a leading PC components and networking solutions reseller and my friend had the good fortune to be their newest account manager. It was a busy, banter-filled office full of jokes, jabs, and jitters that he enjoyed very much. It was a good introduction to the industry.
So, after his initial training, he was handed a huge list of companies who either hadn’t traded with his new employers in the last year or had only spent a few quid. It was his task to call all these companies and qualify them appropriately; find out if they held stock, how many orders they made a week, that kind of thing.
During the pursuit of this task, he noticed that his colleagues’ phones would ring and when they answered they seemed short and uninterested with who was on the other end. One day, he asked the guy sitting next to him why this was after he had finished one of these calls:
‘Who was that?’
‘Someone asking for a quote. Get them off the phone as soon as you can. They’re time wasters.’
And then he changed the subject.
Whenever my friend got these calls, he would follow the advice he was given. Someone wanting to know the price of 25 ASUS motherboards or 50 Samsung hard drives or 30 Microsoft Office licenses would simply get the price then a quick, ‘Goodbye’.
One day, in the month of May, after he got his feet under the desk and knew what he was doing, the phone rang. He picked it up and this is my best recollection of that conversation as my friend told it to me:
‘Good morning’ My friend said with a smile.
‘Morning’, the man had a chirpy voice and a Brummie accent, ‘I need a quote for 75 Samsung televisions if you don’t mind?’
My friend obliged, of course, and after giving him the price he should had ended the phone call and got on with his day. But he didn’t. Instead, he continued the conversation.
‘While I’ve got you on the line, mate’, My friend began, ‘How come you need so many TV’s?’
It sounded like a stupid question until he got the answer.
‘Oh, well, my company have won the contract to kit out Aston Villa football ground, we’re going to need TV’s, video equipment, the whole lot, really.’
Dollar signs appeared in my friends’ eyes, like a cartoon character.
‘Well, let's see the best offer we can give you for all that…’
The conversation went on for another 15 minutes or so and when it was over, my friend had agreed on a deal with the customer for the 75 TV’s. He knocked the carriage cost down and that sweetened the deal enough to move forward. The profit made from this one sale amounted to ¾ of his target for that month.
Morale Of This Tale
The reason for telling you this tale is to hammer home the point that not listening to people can be what gets you ahead in your job. Doing what the other guy is not willing to do can be the very act that separates you both in terms of quality. Sometimes, going against the established method is the very act that will create a newer, better method in the future.
