Week One Recap

Well,

The first week of work is over ... and while I'm taking a lunch break today, I thought I'd just give a little recap.

First off, I have to say I absolutely love the products, which makes it easier to sell. I know that in my previous jobs we could have used all of the products at some point. Additionally, down the line we were looking at a portal where our clients could log in and review their procurement status - Charts would have been great!

The first 2 1/2 days were reading, reading, and more reading. I was also taking what templates has been offered and editing them into my words all-the-while trying to understand when they get used.

I was also learning the basics of our Customer Management Database - called Maximizer. It's actually not a bad program considering we have well over 25,000 clients input. It is totally different from the CRM program I was introduced to in NYC. There are idiosyncracies associated with Maximizer, but they're quite manageable .... which is nice.

In the afternoon of the third day, I got my first batch of leads. At the end of every day, "information emails" are created as a result of anyone downloading an evaluation copy of any of our products. These are collated and "farmed" out to us (rotating daily) in Sales. Each batch usually contains approximately 125 leads. So, every five days you get roughly 125 new oppportunities that you need to follow up on.

The first thing to do is to see if a lead isn't actually someone else's. Should the be the case, you forward the lead onto that individual. Otherwise, time to enter them into Maximizer and create a "To-Do" to send them an email introducing yourself and asking whether they've tried the product and whether they have any questions.

Then, it's a matter of managing these opportunities until the either buy, ignore us, or tell us to leave them the hell alone.

Most of the communications are via emails. Exceptions tend to be for N. American companies and companies in english speaking areas in Europe - this can include Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain, as alot of the business-types speak English.

Anyways, I got my leads and have already created a couple of quotes and have 2 more companies very interested in purchasing. This is quite good, as I don't have an established sales quota yet! Not a bad thing ... impressing your boss in the first few days. LOL.

Although I've never thought I'd be able to do a job involving Sales (thankfully there's no Cold Calling in this job), I'm enjoying this. There will be pressure to make your quotas (once I get mine), the gang is great, the company is growing like gangbusters, and there's tons of money to be (eventually) earned.

I guess I'll stay for a while!!

Now, as for my weight - I actually lost a little bit more - another 1.5 lbs. It's all been a result of eating better and snacking less! Who'd a thunk it!?