Wow! What a week. Seems that starting a new career path can be a challenge. For the past five weeks I have been working in a new direction with my sales indeavor. Still working with food products and still preforming route sales. The part that really works on you is that with all of the experience that I have my training was only seven days long. So, in the minds of others that know your skills think that you can do the job right now.
Though that may be true to some extent, there are differences that need to be adressed and taught. So my learning curve is shorter then someone that has less time selling route sales. ie. driving a route truck safely, knowing back door proceedures at the markets, and so forth. However understanding how well certain products sell or don't in certain stores needs to be taught, and trained to all new employees.
In the seven days I was 'trained' the training was mostly about how to load the truck and just runing the route. The route was set up for no time for just covering the customers. No time for selling. No time for doing the job the right way. Even making back door times were a challenge.
Thankfully this all will change as the routes are being re-engineered. That is to say that the routes are being made over to make it so that all customers will be serviced to a more complete extent. These kind of changes made to routes have to be done when a territory becomes harder to make because the customer count has grown or the business within the accounts has grown to where service starts to lag.
Going through this process for the salesperson can be stressful. Most of the concern is usually about the bottom line, paycheck. In some cases it is true that the pay will be lower at least for a little while. If you are a salesperson then you will dig a little deeper and find a way to sell more with the customers that you have. You will or should look for new opportunities within your route.
In my case two major companies have joined together to become the second largest snack food company in the country. Re-engineering the routes had to happen because of the sheer number of products from the two combined companies. With nearly double the number of UPC's the routes had to be redone. Now with less customers to service there will be more dollars per account and more time to do what we do best, sell.
