I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Had meetings in London and Birmingham today. In Wellington, or even Auckland you can often manage 5+ meetings in a day. In the UK you’re lucky if you can get 3.
The travel/meet time ratio is very high. Today I spent 7 hours travelling for 2 hours of meetings. Of course you try to schedule as much together as you can but often that is as good as you can do. That time and cost forces UK sales people to be very disciplined. Within a few weeks a new salesperson sees their return on time and cost and starts qualifying hard making sure each meeting is effective.
Really good sales people do a lot of account planning to maximise their ROI and have enough leads to make their numbers even if a few deals drift into the next period.
NZ companies need to know how expensive it can be. Today we spent £5 on parking, £17 on a train into town, and if we had of trained to Birmingham it would have been another £60 each.
Doing the hard yards in the UK with experienced sales people is a valuable thing to do. Over the past couple of years I’ve learnt a huge amount. Selling is tough, but it’s very rewarding. It is much less about the stereotypes of ego and big personalities. Sales success comes from discipline, listening, effort and prioritisation.
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