In sales when you walk in, you're walking into a total strangers office and then you have to say, "How can I differentiate myself from another salesperson." Why would you want to buy from me, versus the other eight people that have been in here? What little things could I do to make you remember me? You look at all these shows where they actually go out and perform and they say, "Make yourself different from someone else." How does that happen? Little things laminate, look at articles in the paper, their daughter got engaged, cut that out, laminate it, takes two seconds, cost nothing. It's just effort on your part. So, the next time you go in you say, "Hey you know what mike, I noticed your daughter got engaged, I read that in a paper and I made you a laminated copy of that and I actually put it in a little frame for you." That goes so far with customers, five years later, they still have that sitting on their desk and they know that you did that. So, little things, picking up things. I went to a customer one time that was in Chester, which is probably 20 miles from here. A lady was upset that the fact that she needed three or four boxes to get to Wellsburg, because there was another customer that was driving to WVU to take stuff down to her daughter. "I just don't know how I'm going to do that." I said, "Well I'm headed down there." I said, "Why don't we just put your boxes in my car?" I said, "I'm headed to Wellsburg. They're a customer of mine too I'll drop that off." Customer for life. It's not that you do it for anything in return, just be a good person and people notice that. Then how do you pass that on to new salespeople? How do they see that? Why do they say, hey why do you get a phone call where the customer says, hey you know what, send me ten more of those that you sent me. That's how it happens, they learn to trust you. The other thing is, do not break that trust. If there is a price increase, if there is a modification to the product, before you place that order, you call and confirm that with the customer, because that is trouble if you don't do that, you keep them informed. Same thing in big operations, you make sure purchasing is taken care of period, but you got to do these little things, you don't have to, but it's the way that a customer will remember you. You walk in and you say, hey there's that flying WV, I went to school there. Both my kids went to school there, next thing you know, oh yeah you know what, my daughter was in the education program. My daughter was too. The next thing you're like wait a minute, we saw you guys down there. Now, all of a sudden you and the competitor are even, I'm going to tell you you're going to get the order. So, that really just be observant of what's around you and like what you do. Get up and want to go to work and I'm telling you, work is called work for a reason. You can still work hard and have fun.
