You should always make that one last visit even if it is without an appointment.
I am very firmly of the view that field sales people should never go anywhere without an appointment. I have practiced and taught the art of appointment generation. It is vital skill that all field sales people should have in their toolbox.
Are there any exceptions? You bet your sweet Bibby there are. A long time ago in the sun-drenched fishing village of Stoke on Trent I was getting to the end of a particularly fraught day on the road visiting customers and prospects, to sell building materials. Not much had gone well.
Its five minutes to five. No one wants to see a sales guy at that time, right? I’m about to head home when I decided to call on spec at the offices of a large building company. A firm we had never done business with, and I was about to find out why.
I had the name of one Quantity Surveyor (QS) a man I could never get an appointment with. I Presented my card at reception and asked to see him. To my surprise he asked me to come up to his office. Turns out it’s a shared office. Turns out that there were half a dozen QS’s in there. It was the working habit of this group to go out and visit their various building sites (each QS being responsible for two or three sites) during the day and get back to the office for around five fifteen to wrap up their day. This included placing last minute orders for building materials. A time when most Builders Merchants (including the one I worked for at the time) were also packing in for the day.
So, there I was in a room full of blokes all wanting to place orders for the stuff I was selling. With only minor negotiation on price I hoovered those orders up. They were small orders, but they represented a breakthrough with this customer as we had never sold them anything previously. The relationship grew from there and we progressed to picking up larger orders. They were brilliant payers too.
We had never done business with these guys because we had no knowledge of the way they liked to work. They were (as we all are to some extent) creatures of habit spending time phoning round Builders Merchants at the end of the day hoping to catch someone who would take an order off them. I called in to that office without an appointment at five pm two or three times a week and (almost) became part of their team. I learned that they were not the only company in the area to work in the same way. You can guess the rest.
So field sales people, always have a core of appointments in your working day but have a fall back plan as to what you are going to do if one of them drops out and always, always make that one last call of the day even if it is without an appointment.
B2B Field Sales – Do You Need an Appointment?
B2B Field Sales – Do You Need an Appointment?
