My new job was a releif route salesman. I would fill in for vacations and sick days and ride along and help the route salesmen. I was a relief salesman for about a month when a salesman quit. I got my first route, it was the worse route out of seventeen. The route went toward Toledo, Ohio. It covered the northwest corner of Ohio along the Indiana, Michigan border.
It was 1978 when I began with Coca Cola. This plant had just came off of a long strike. This stike cost the company a lot of customers and money. As a result a lot of the customers were not as coopertive as the company would have liked, it was going to take time to earn back the trust of the customer. I had about eight to twelve customers a day to call on so there wasn’t a lot of time to waste. My day started early before a lot of traffic started to get on the roadways. The first account was about an hour away and the last account would be also about an hour away. In those days a route salesman would do it all except for loading the trucks.
All of the products were packed in either glass returnable or non-returnable bottles and six pack cans. The glass product weighed a lot and the commission was higher on that product. The accounts were made up of everything from supermarkets to garages that had a small vending machine. The job of a route salesman was not to be a glorified delivery boy, but to be a salesman. To do the job properly you would have to find a way to increase your routes business and in the process grow your customers business. In order to grow the customers business you would have to take the time to set up the ads and displays. The other part of the senereo of the route salesman job would be to pick up new customers. That's growing your route and your business.
The best way to succeed at being a route salesman is to look at the companies business as if it were your own business. Taking this attitude is what helped me to get through the hard days on the route. I fostered the idea that in sales, no matter what company, no matter what position I had, I still regarded the companies business as my own. This is what helped me to succeed at any position in the company I had.
I remember that I was trying to figure out where I would get new customers from. So everyday as I drove by what I believed could be a potential account I would write down what the account was. I would, in my mind, pick out a couple potential accounts each week and would make every effort to stop and introduce myself and would make the inquiries for what it would take to earn the business from that customer. I would first ask to speak to the owner or for the decidion maker at that business. In the route business or for that matter any sales position you may have you cannot waste time talking to the wrong person my giving them the whole sales pitch. You can take the time with that person to retrive the information that you may need to get to the right person that you must see. You may very well return to this account several time before you get to the right person that you what to see, and every time seeing the same person that gave you the information to begin with. More than once had I been through this very same process and was starting to get frustrated with the idea that I was wasting my time only to find just before I gave up that the whole time I was dealing with the decision maker. Most of the time they just wanted to see if you would return and that’s how they would judge the level of service you may give.
