June 8-22: San Francisco-Anchorage-Honolulu
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I spent my first four years at Cullinane working as an installation and training specialist. I was pretty good at, and clients seemed to think so too, and I got requested by name fairly frequently.

Towards the beginning of this year, though, John Cullinane and everyone else just about began to suggest to me that they thought I would be a success on the sales side; they thought that my technical expertise would give me a leg up, and that the techniques that salespeople use could be learned. I had great respect for John and the other guys who thought I could do the job and I agreed to give it a try.

From the beginning, though, I found it much harder than training. What I did not like particularly was the constant telephoning that was required. Actually, I suppose that I don't like to carry on any conversation for an extended period of time, no matter what the medium, but with sales it was even worse. Sometimes, a prospect would come to us with the definite idea that a reporting system was needed, and would already have done some work. Most times, though, we would get leads from seminars and such, and in these cases the sales guy has to convince the prospect first that he needs the product, and then that ours is the product he needs.

I didn't have any trouble with the second step, because if anyone compares the available reporting systems with their features and what they can do, CULPRIT will come out on top. What I did have trouble with was the first part. I am not very good at telling people what they need. I figure that everyone is equally intelligent (at least at the level I had to deal with) and that all a salesman should do is present the decision-maker with the facts. Unfortunately, most sales seem to be clinched on intangibles, and that's very difficult to deal with. You might as well ask Mr. Spock to cry.

So I began to spend most of my time on the phone, working from my condo in Chicago. I still traveled a good deal, but it wasn't so much to client sites (I still did a few installations) as it was to trade shows, conventions, and sales seminars that we held in cities across the Midwest. But my problem continued to be that while I was quite good at explaining why CULPRIT and EDP-AUDITOR were the best of their breed of product, I was less good at getting IT people and auditors to realize that they needed reporting software in the first place.

One other note here.

It's June and there haven't been any pictures for me to include on an album page. For the first half of this year, I didn't travel to any place worth photographing that I hadn't already been to and photographed before. That's why the first album page for this year will be for a trip in July that I made to lead a sales seminar in Anchorage, Alaska.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	June 8-22: San Francisco-Anchorage-Honolulu
	Return to Index for 1978