Sales Joke of the Day (March 8) File Exchange.

It was nearing the end of the the quarter and the Vice President of Sales sent out an urgent email asking his reps to email him a copy of their latest updated forecasts immediately.


The salesman, who had been sandbagging a deal or two, decided to now include the extra several hundred thousand dollars in potential sales, look like a rock star, and take the opportunity to ask for a raise.  So he attached his file to the response email, but not before entitling it, "Increase_my_pay."


A few moments later his email was returned, acknowledging the great effort in drumming up new business.  But there was no comment on the file name or his likelihood of getting a raise.


It was then that the salesman noticed that his attachment had been returned and the name of his file had been changed to, "Fat_chance."


Moral of the story.   True sales professionals know that when it comes to negotiating wage increases, it always pays to do it face to face.   Be bold and assertive,  Letting management know that you are going to be in their face until you are justly rewarded, will often work in your favor.  However, being meek and hiding behind file name changes to get your point across, will never go anywhere.  Those tactics are too easy to get rid of, or ignore.


The same can be said for sales in general.   Want to close a big deal?   Go out into the field and meet your customers face to face.  Make it impossible for them to ignore you.   Or you can stay in the office, send out a bunch of templated emails and hope that "Tinkerbell" waves her magic wand and whisks you away to quota attainment.   The choice is yours.


"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."    - Henry David Thoreau

Sales Joke of the Day (January 21) New Twist on the Meaning of "HOTmail"

An Illinois salesman left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day.

When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email. Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her email address, he did his best to type it in from memory.

Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream and fell to the floor in a dead faint. At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

DEAREST WIFE: JUST GOT CHECKED IN. EVERYTHING PREPARED FOR YOUR ARRIVAL TOMORROW.

P. S.   SURE IS HOT DOWN HERE.

Moral of the story.   True sales professionals understand that in order to be successful at sales they need to be accurate with their emails.   Failure to ensure that you know, and correctly identify and personalize your targets, plus, failure provide them with information of value, could be considered spam.  Being considered a spammer, one who sends out meaningless promotions to folks they don't know, could have a big negative impact on your ability to send real emails to real potential prospects in the future.  Several mail servers could 'blacklist' you and that could have a real negative impact on your future earnings.

"Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just don't.  I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph."      -  Clay Shirky