Attitude

Windshield Time -

When I began my seed selling career, I was put in charge of three states.  It was just me, our dealers and customers.

The problem was, I didn’t have any dealers or customers.

I was the first employee of a brand new seed company so I was starting from zero in all three states.  That obviously meant that I didn’t have any sales either.

As a result, I had to spend a lot of time on the road, behind the windshield of my pickup searching for buyers and sellers for our seed.   After all, my job description only had one line in it, sell seed.                          . 

So I spent a lot of time driving.  I considered a sale of any size, anywhere in the three state areas to be an opportunity and a step forward, regardless of how inefficient the pursuit may have been.

I logged thousands and thousands of miles.  In fact, the more miles I drove, the greater feeling of satisfaction I had that I had been working really hard.

But if I have any right at all to a disclaimer on this point it is that we had no cell phones, e-mail or even fax machines.  The highest level of communication that was available to a road warrior was the telephone booth and some small towns didn’t even have one of those.

I didn’t even have a tape player in my pickup to listen to self-improvement tapes, at least until a few years later.

But it took me only one selling season to realize that my system of logging miles was getting me nowhere fast.

Even though my year ended with a very nice first year sales increase, I was worn out and so was my pickup.    Click to continue…