Trains...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Mon, Nov 12, 2012

Sales and TrainsOn my way to NYC on the Acela this morning.  Door to door, three hours, and I’m then plunked into the heart of Manhattan after working in an uninterrupted environment, having a not-so-bad breakfast and doing some quiet soul searching.  A perfect trip.

I’ve been taking trains my entire life.  Starting with my mother packing me and my brothers into a sleeper car on the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago to visit our grandparents, trains have become a way of   life for me.  With countless trips on the Silver Meteor to Miami, the California Zephyr and the Southwest Chief across Texas, just the magical names of the trains bring back memories of great trips talking to other train buffs in the dome car gazing out both the plains and the snow covered Rockies.   Lots of superb on-time rides, but I also remember breaking down in the desert for a day between LA and Vegas, and then there was that time trying to sleep on a wooden floor in an officially closed depot in the middle of winter in Elkhart, Indiana.   But those experiences have also been  the source of often-repeated, and, of course over the years, slightly exaggerated, stories.

Horace Rice Derby resized 600Training is also in my blood since my great grandfather, Horace, worked as the Baggage Master in the tiny depot in the even tinier town of Poultney, Vermont.  Now a pretty good restaurant, I’ve had dinner at his restored depot a few times always wondering what Horace would think about my training today.   

  • Rather than walking down to the local depot, I purchase an eticket online
  • Since I don’t have a physical ticket, the conductor  scans my QR code on my iPhone
  • And, of course, there’s no-cost Internet service during the entire trip

 

 

 

My guess is that Horace would have been up-to-speed with technology.  After all, he left Vermont at the age of 18 to head west and join the First Volunteer Regiment of California where he spent the next four years as a soldier on the frontier of what is today New Mexico before heading back-by train, of course-to Poultney.   He also saw the first electric street cars come to Main Street a few years later and the founding of Green Mountain College four blocks down the road from the depot.  Given all that I’ve learned about him over the years, I doubt that he would have been threatened by a smartphone or an iPad.

Sales processes today are all about math, metrics, the customized process itself and, most importantly, the technology applications that seamlessly plug into your CRM.   With technology changing now at an increasingly rapid rate (“Should I get the new iPhone, or not?  Don’t really need to, but, it sure would be nice.”), with massive storage costs costing pennies and new really cool sales enablement apps appearing every week, the onus is on all of us to make sure that we're tuned up and totally comfortable with today’s sales and marketing technologies.   Today, I think that I’m pretty fluent in the language of Salesforce and can reasonably get buy in HubSpot–Speak.  I’ve locked down most of my basic sales tool apps, but I still take 90 minutes early every Saturday morning to push deeper into the sales and marketing tech tools that I already own while I fumble with trying to learn yet another language.

Just as trains have moved to planes (and in my case, have moved back again to trains), it’s critical that all of us in Sales make enough time to keep on the cutting edge of technology.  Something to think about in our increasingly crowded scheduling for 2013 planning.

Good Selling

Jack,
Head Coach
Linked In and Sales

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