I love talking to people. It's one of the reasons I was a good journalist. I had no problems going up to anyone, anywhere, even if it was a man wearing filthy overalls at a gas station because I was interested in why he had so much scrap metal in his truck bed for a story I was working on.
On my recent business trip, I had an opportunity to talk to two members of our sales force - one of whom had been with my company since 1974. That's right - for eight years before I was even born.
The stories these two women told were fascinating. They had, after all, been with the company since the sales force were charged with selling encyclopedia sets at county fairs and door to door. They took me back to a time when my company was "a book company" with just five products that would never have CDs.
One of the sales reps couldn't afford a set, but was told that if she sold three sets to three other people, she could give up her commission and instead receive a set of encyclopedias. She thought that would be easy, and for her at that time it was. She stuck with the company after those initial sales.
I learned that the dreaded response was from stay-at-home moms saying, "I'll have to talk to my husband," and that before e-mail, the stack of faxes the reps would receive would sometimes topple over because they were so high.
When the Internet exploded, these ladies said they were terrified as to what it would do to the business. They had be cracking up when the told the story that it took four ladies several hours in a hotel room to figure out how to connect to the Internet, even though one of the women had brought her phone from home. And the reason they weren't successful was that they had forgotten to plug in the Internet cable.
In some ways it sounded like a much simpler time and in others it seemed more difficult. Either way, it was fascinating.
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