We live in an age where we have come to
rely on technology that has been developed to serve us, yet too often it seems
that technology is what drives our daily working lives. Twenty years ago when the
first cell phones were like house bricks, we could not have imagined the
instantaneous image sharing power of social media, checking our bank accounts
online, and calling our overseas contacts via videophone or from our laptops
and other mobile devices.
In my first years of international travel,
we relied on landlines in offices and hotels where I think the telephone lines
must have been gold leafed for the amount they charged. I remember being in the
Connaught Hotel in Bombay in late 1996, arguing furiously over a $120.00 phone
bill charged to my room when I had made one short phone call, received two, and
sent and received two 3-page faxes. From memory they rounded it down to $100.00
after I had made a huge fuss and insisted on talking to the hotel General
Manager. And all this with minutes to spare before my shuttle ride to the
airport to catch my plane to New Delhi.
A few years earlier I had been in New
York’s Penn Station waiting in line for one of the telephone booths. My calls
were charged to an AT&T company card, where not only did I have to tap in
each handy 14 digit UK telephone number, but prior to that there was the
equally handy 16 digit AT&T number which thankfully only had to be tapped
in once. And if you got a digit wrong you had to start all over again. I was
told by a New York Cop that drug gangs used to stand behind the phone booths
and memorise your AT&T numbers, so that when you had made your calls they
could use your card to ply their despicable trade.
Back then we had to schedule when we used
the telephone. Peak time calls were much more expensive, and international
calls were still prohibitively so. Today, we can just dial on our portable
handset and Bingo! Yet we all need breathing time, thinking time, planning
time, and people time. We humans were not really designed to drive at 70mph, or
fly in aeroplanes, or be constantly available to talk to customers even as we
lie on sun loungers on a Menorcan beach. Many of us have become slaves to our
own technology.
How can you hold two conversations at once
anyway? It’s about time management. Time to make phone calls. Time to email.
Time to write reports. And most importantly time for the people you are talking
to, your family and friends, your colleagues, your customers. In any case, technology
really does have its limitations because nothing can replace a handshake or a
welcome kiss. As well as travelling to see them, I also encouraged my
international distributors to travel to the UK to see how we did things, how we
made things in our factories, how we were at work and at play. So we took them
to football matches, on tours of Manchester, out to the theatre, and into the
English Lake District.
Our customer services team in Accrington
mostly had wonderful Lancashire accents, and at times they struggled to
understand many of our international customers on the telephone, or to make
themselves understood. Now here’s a thing. One of our Agents from Singapore could
not make himself easily understood on the phone, but when he visited our offices
and was introduced to all the people he spoke regularly to, the communication barrier
disappeared. And interestingly after his visit, there was only rarely a
communication problem.
Your factory and office staff are part of
your selling process. Part of the team that helps create and send goods to your
international customers. I used to dread overseas customers visiting a
machinery factory where I worked in Cumbria, because we had told such a great
story in our marketing and promotional material (this was way before websites
arrived), when the reality was that we worked from a ramshackle old factory
built in 1859 into a Windermere hillside. So the 90 minute drive from
Manchester Airport was always a bit nerve-wracking, as I tried to play down the
expectations of our visiting customers who anticipated a new-build state of the
art production facility. The charm of the Lake District always helped, but it
was the quality of the people who worked there who generally stole the show. And
Roger the tooling guy was always far better at explaining what he did than I
could ever do, and was probably our best machine salesman!
So more lessons learned:
1.
Manage your communication
equipment before it manages you.
2.
Don’t be afraid to turn off
your phone. People who want you will find you.
3.
Give yourself time every day to
think, prioritise and plan
4.
You can never replace a face to
face meeting.
5.
Involve your whole team. We are
all salespeople in our own special ways.
JOHN REED
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