The life in sales

Rule #1: The day will never go according to your Outlook calendar.

Invariably true, regardless of what the day looks like. Doubly true on busy days because there is a direct relationship between the amount of time you have booked-up and the last-minute demands placed on you from outside (often unexpected) sources.

Have an 8:30 A.M. meeting on top of an afternoon sales call? Well then of course the meeting will go an hour over. Manageable as long as your email and/or voice mail is not overloaded when you return. Though as Murphy will attest, it most certainly is.

Do you need to confirm your afternoon sales call because the client, in an act that epitomizes the
nature of the rep-client relationship, did not return your call from yesterday afternoon? Then of course you must call again.

Imagine though that, as if part of some larger cat-and-mouse game, your client is not in. Underlings promise that he'll be back in the office well before you need to leave for the meeting.

Yet, you find yourself calling three more times only to find yourself ultimately canceling because the window has closed and you can't make the meeting work for today. What a wonderful development.

Now that the whole day has been blown and psychologically you're completely thrown off your game (everything that the day was devoted to blew up when the call was canceled), what do you do? How do you recover?

There is a tonic for such things. You retreat to a safe haven; a place where there are no clients, no deadlines and no such thing as percent-to-goal.

You run to the neighborhood Starbucks and order a big old Cup 'o Joe!