Your Reward Will Come

Here’s a cool true story sent to me by my business associate Tom president of Aljex software.

“ I started in freight brokering a long time ago. It taught me a big lesson about sales. I was about 20 years old. I had already worked in a freight broker’s office for a couple of years at that time. I knew that if we had the right freight, we could do a great job moving it. My boss had previously done all the sales. I thought if he could do it, I could do it. As a matter of fact, I thought it would be pretty easy.

I started sales with two basic techniques. Plan A was to make calls, try and get appointments, and with an appointment go see the prospect. Plan B was to just go door to door, and try to see the person immediately, and if not, at least find out who to call and get their phone number.

In the following 6 or 7 months, I did plan A, plan B and Plan C, D, E and anything else I could think of. I was working like a maniac, but not getting a lot of results. My boss didn’t think I could sell, (because I had so little business) and I was threatened with getting fired pretty much every week. It was painful. I was working so hard, and so many people were promising me that they were going to try us out, but didn’t. I was afraid I’d get fired before it all panned out. And the thought crossed my mind: Maybe I can’t do it?

One day, I decided to take off. It was depressing to make so many sales calls and get so little result. I went skiing with a friend. During the day, I took a break and called into the office. My boss was all excited. “Where were you?” he asked. “You had three new customers ship today!!” He said, “Pharmacia (my biggest prospect) just gave us three loads to Texas, and three loads to California.”

It was the day that changed everything for me. One day. From that point on, I had business, and more and more of my prospects started trying us out, and became regular customers. I eventually opened up my own freight brokerage with my clients. The best part was I kept some of those first clients for over 17 years. Getting started takes time. If you have the right product to sell, you can be very successful if you really give it your best effort.” http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif


Moving forward,

Jeff Roach