I learned to be prosistant. I also learned that being pushy was not a way to show the customer that you cared for their wants and needs. Selling after all is discovering what the customers wants and needs are. Sometimes it comes down to wants vs. needs. I as a salesman have learned that it is easy to get hung up on what your wants and needs are compared to the customer. Though yours are important too, you cannot really be successful until you put your customes wants and needs in front of yours. If you help the customer achive success you will achive success.
Here I was working for the largest soft drink company in the world. I was proud that I was, and I was going to make it a career. After only a few months I had picked up a number of new accounts and I had gotten my customers that ran ads into a cycle of running Coca Cola. This increased my sales and that was a direct result of a larger paycheck. I was providing for my family and it was good. This was the most money I had ever made. However the down side was that by doing all of this extra business I had less time for my home life. At the time I didn’t think that much about it. I knew that what I was doing was providing for my family. I was doing what I loved, selling. There were contest for sales and for getting new accounts and I won a lot of them. After about six months I won my first ‘Salesman Of The Month’. I really got a big head from that and I was so proud as well as the rest of my family was. I wanted to receive that award as many times as I could. There was no monitary gain from receiving it other that receiving a plaque and a parking place close to the entrance door. It was enough to just receive the award.
This kind of sales that I was doing at Coca Cola was different than I had done before. I didn’t have to make a list of potential buyers that list was already established and was placed on route cards that you followed in the order that they were set. The sales were there automatically for most of the items that sold off the shelf. My job was to grow the business from what was given me. This meant that I would sell the customer on incremental space for displays and to try to get more shelf space for new products or for products that were selling beyond the capacity of what the allocated space could hold.
At first, being new to this job, I was more interested in just servicing every customer. This was going to be tough with the attitudes of the customer toward my company for the strike that they had just been through. The service levels had not really existed for most of the spring and part of the summer. Sales were lost to the point that Coca Cola’s status in the marketplace had fallen below Pepsi Cola and even so low as to be down under 7-UP. Making it right with the customer was the major task at hand. Even when the customer in my route area was being serviced before the strike, they really weren’t being taken care of 100 percent. Sometimes they were skipped and wouldn’t see there salesman for a week longer or so. If they were smaller it was like the person that serviced the route just didn’t bother to stop. This route was the one that went the furtherest from the plant so even the management was at fault for letting things get this way.
The accounts that were the largest got all of the attention. They were large enough to be noticed by all levels of management that’s where they would go to drive the business. Even though there had been a strike they had been taken care of the most, before the smaller customer. The thinking that servicing the biggest customers would be the way to make money during the strike. I may not have all of the control over the largest customers, but I did over all of the rest. I made sure that they were serviced to the levels that they deserved. I built a relationship with all of my customers. That’s not to say that there weren’t some hard heads out there because there certainly were. I tried to be courteous to all reguardless. By doing so I increased my hours on the route. I was working longer and harder, harder that I had ever worked before in my life.
