The Sales Force— Working With Reps
This is the ninth in a number of articles serializing The Sales Force— Working With Reps by Charles Cohon, MANA’ s president and CEO. The entire book may be found in the member area of MANA’ s website.
“ I’ m swirling in the bowl,” thought Jim as he drove home that night.“ I spent a bunch of time with Harold working on distributor council issues, which means when Ernie goes through the salespeople’ s call reports he’ s going to see that for the last two months I’ ve made the fewest sales calls of any Bigglie salesperson. Plus I just gave a presentation that our company president and new sales manager hated. Add to that the fact that I undoubtedly stepped on Brocaw’ s toes when I made recommendations on compensation issues that are the sales manager’ s responsibility. Buchanan probably associates me with Harold because of the work Harold and I did together and obviously has a problem facing people he has fired, so he is probably uncomfortable being around me. Oh, and to top it off, two of my largest customers have moved away so my numbers for the last two months have dropped off.”
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Ordinarily Jim tried not to take problems home and he rarely brought up business at the dinner table. He told himself that he preferred to leave that stress at the office. A more impartial observer might have suggested that Jim found his wife Ruth’ s position as a Fortune 500 VP of human resources a little intimidating, and felt the small-company problems that made up his day only would serve to underscore how much less than Ruth he had accomplished. That observer also might have noted that Jim’ s reluctance deprived him of a superb resource, because Ruth Anderson was one of the smartest people Jim had ever met. In the past 10 years since they’ d graduated from college, she’ d thrived in corporate America, earned an MBA and obviously was on the fast track for further advancement. Now that Jim had hit bottom, however, he knew he must let her