Today, was an interesting and trying day for me. I am now working for a sales/promotion company as an independent distributor. This means that I am technically my own business, but that happens to only contract for Sports Marketing Inc. What I like about the company is the opportunity that I have to be mentored by some excellent people. Honestly, the quality of the people I work with is the reason I chose to work there.
I am doing well there now. Not surprisingly I've learned the basics of pitching/sales rather quickly and I am simply refining my technique at this point. At the end of my first week I was "setting the pace" for the promotion that I was working on. This means that I was selling the most Dodger ticket packages of any of the other distributors at the office. On Tuesday morning, one of the managers at the office called all the distributers into the office and explained that some people would have to pick up the pace and sell more pieces or having them work for Sports Marketing would be a waste of time for them and for the company. She then went on to say that people who were interested in moving up should be watching me because I was next in line to be promoted. As you can imagine, that was a nice little confidence boost. Fortunately, and unfortunately I have been identified as a leader at the company now. I say unfortunately simply because I am not a leader yet. Even though I am only a distributor, yesterday I was actually invited to be present for a meeting on the development of what will eventually become a brand new division for the company. I was also assigned to train a new employee. Normally only managers or assistant managers train new employees--or at the very least a person who is an account manager. Having me train this new person was kind of unheard of since I am still going through the training myself in a way. The only problem was that I was not able to work the field myself as much and as a result I didn't make as much money. I wasn't too worried about that though. I figured I just had an off day. Today I had another person to train: this time someone who had actually been working longer than me. They had been trained by some other people before, but were having some problems because no one had broken the pitch down for her piece by piece and helped her correct some bad habits she had begun to develop. It wasn't hard but I was able to get her back on track. The bad things was that do to a combination of me mis-judging some customers and some genuinely bad locations for selling I ended up not selling a single piece of merchandise. I did every thing that I had tried to do right, but the results simply weren't there today. I hurt a bit to think about how I had fumbled opportunities but in the end I know that it was bound to happen eventually. Everyone goes home empty at some point. If I never had a day like today I would never know what it feels like to handle the frustration, disappointment and confusion of coming home carrying merchandise instead of money.
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