Sales and Management

I have been in sales for 15 years now last 10 or so selling Cisco in Central America and after Millions of dollars in sales i have learned a few things. Some of my biggest sales and long term friendships have come from customers that have purchased something a system or a large network and had problems with the technology. If as a sales engineer i get that customer through the difficult times and make their network really work really shine for their business i have something much more then my commission and our company has something much more then a sale, we have their trust. I learned form the onset in sales, sell to the decision maker/owner. But my goal is always to have the trust and confidence of the business owner. The way i’ve been able to achieve that is make it work. I sold, at one point, the largest IP Telephony network in Central America to a company. They had like 22 factories and thousands of employees. The company was run by the owner’s son’s and they managed various factories. One day i got a call from the owner (he was like in his early 70’s and not very big on technology) he was yelling at me about the network and how it did not work, you can imagine.. I caught the first flight i could to meet with him later that afternoon. In the meeting he was showing me how his fancy IP phone was crap. As he would dial he lifted his hand about a foot away from the phone and slammed his finger down, then he would say, “see the damn thing doesn’t work”. I could see right away what the problem was, so i want to Radio Shack a got one of those phones with big buttons and connected it to an ATA. He was happy…. We have continued to do business for years.

My point is work with your customers and your customer is really yours.

I have yet to speak to someone in Nextone management about all the problems we have been facing because of their flawed software, maybe we are not the biggest customer but we will have six thousand ports by the end of 2007 and doing close to 100 million min. monthly.  I can’t understand anyone in sales/management that would pass up that opportunity it’s almost a crime.

This entry was posted on September 12, 2007 at 3:10 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print