Dave Stein's Blog: An Independent Perspective on Sales Training and Sales Effectiveness

I made a quick trip to Dublin this week to work with my colleagues at Dublin Institute of Technology.  One person on our team suggested that the situation was tough.  I had presented to a diverse team from an Irish multi-national. 

Tough? That wasn’t tough. Through my many years as a trainer and speaker, I’ve been through a lot.  I learned what tough is.

Tough is:

• Keynoting in the front of a room with 500 sales people who just got their new compensation plans–all with higher quotas and reduced territories.  Hardly a fun, receptive group. 
• Addressing a room with 100 sales people who still remained after the company they worked for fired 50 of their colleagues the day before.  They weren’t happy either. 
• Being slotted for a 45-minute keynote, where the company founder went over his time by 25-minutes, which left me with 20.  Since the slides were controlled by someone else backstage, 45-minutes of slides remained.  Not the smoothest speech I ever gave.  And, there were a thousand people in the audience.
• Oversleeping (the only time in my career) by an hour, after flying the night before to Lake Como, outside of Milan, Italy. The U.S. country manager of the company banged on my door to wake me up. In the meeting room were 10 country managers, all quite perturbed. The CEO told me in front of the group, “We’ve clearly started off on the wrong foot. You have until lunch to get our interest.” I’m happy to say the day went well.  I was invited to join the group for dinner that evening. (I now set three alarms.)
• Running a session with 160 people in the room. One guy kept asking probing questions. Not to show off, just to get to the bottom of some issues. I was fine with the questions, but had to move the agenda along.  After the fifth question I asked what his position was at the company. He calmly said, “I’m the CEO.” Ouch. 
• Training a group of sales managers from Latin American countries for three solid days, all through simultaneous translation taking place in booths in the back of the room.  I attempted to insert my usual humor to keep the session light.  Well, humor doesn’t work with a 30-second translation delay. 
• Having an authentic heckler in the audience, who kept saying things like, “Sure!” “Yeah, Right.” all quite sarcastically. I asked politely for his cooperation. Not only didn’t I get it but the audience briefly turned on me. I’m glad to say this only happened to me once.
• Starting a three-day program in Hong-Kong having just awakened with a serious case of the flu. It was a very long three days. 
• Having a bad reaction to some medication and leaving an all day meeting half-way through to go to sleep on a couch in the CFO’s office. I slept for four hours, just in time for a groggy evening entertaining clients. 
• A few “Hey Dave, your fly is open” experiences. I breezed through those. 
• When the video projector didn’t show for the first half of the day. No flip chart, no white board.  Lesson learned. 
• Delivering a thirty-minute keynote at a conference. The audience wanted to make sure they got their dessert and coffee. With all the noise from the wait staff, I could barely be heard.  That taught me to be much more attentive to the timing of meal service.
• Flying to Florida for the day to speak at a sales management conference. I was to go on right after lunch. During lunch the guest speaker, without asking permission or checking with the conference organizers, invited the whole audience to his cigar factory for a cigar smoking party. Everybody left the conference center except for three people, who were my audience. I spoke, then flew home. 
• Asking to have many copies of my book sent to a conference to be sold after my speech. The audience opened the boxes before I arrived and helped themselves to the books. I had purchased them from my publisher.  They were not included in my fee. 
• Delivering a two-hour break-out session at a sales conference.  Two participants were arguing over how high or low the temperature in the room should be.  There was no lock on the thermostat.  As each snuck to the back of the room, the temperature varied from very hot to very cold for the whole session.  A disaster.
• Tripping over the extension cord to the computer in the front of the room, not once, but three times. 
• Running a competitive selling workshop in Tokyo for NEC, when I was a lot less experienced working with international sales teams. The salespeople all spoke some English, which made me too comfortable with my English.  I tried, in vain, to stop them as they frantically thumbed through their Japanese-English dictionaries looking for explanations of phrases like, “Let’s kill some time,”  “Handwriting on the wall,” and “Last, but not least.”

If you have stories of your own, please share them.
 

Filed under: Presentations