People find their way to a sales career from different paths. Some, like me, may have had a different career course in mind, and discover the advantages of a sales career, by accident. Here’s my story, and how I came to develop the Sales Associate®. When I left the Navy, in 1974, I decided that I wanted to go back to graduate school to earn an MBA in Operations Management, and to work in the manufacturing sector for a boat builder—doing a similar job that the Navy trained me to do—as a repair officer on a Destroyer. For my master’s thesis, I wrote a paper on more efficiently organizing a manufacturing inventory control system—with a revolutionary, new product, developed by IBM—called the System 32 minicomputer. That led to a sales position with IBM rather than a career in manufacturing. I was trained in an IBM sales program to provide small computers to medical group practices. In 1976, a “small” computer, by IBM standards, was that same System 32 that I originally wrote about in my inventory control thesis. In 1976, that small IBM computer cost about $44,000. To put this in perspective, at that time the median price of a new home in the USA was about $42,000! Because of the large size of computers in the late 1970’s, you didn’t just “throw” a tablet PC into your briefcase, and go see a prospect. Prospects had to visit the local IBM branch office to see a computer demonstration. At IBM, like any new salesperson, I was struggling to organize my sales leads. Because of my background in operations—and all the readily-available, minicomputer technology at IBM—I discovered that a computer could provide a more efficient and time saving tool to maintain my sales prospect list, and to send out direct mail pieces. In 1977, with a little help from an IBM Systems Engineer, I designed a simple mailing list software program. I also decided that selling to prospects, one at a time, was not for me—I always hated cold calling anyway. I realized that the dynamics of a sales call would change if the prospect contacted me first—rather than by me cold calling them, so I developed a mass marketing seminar approach to sales. I invited physicians, with the help of my computerized physician mailing list, to attend a seminar on the benefits of using an IBM minicomputer in their group practice, to process insurance claims. I’ve done nothing but sales and marketing, since I started with IBM, in 1976. Throughout my sales career, moving from IBM to Control Data, to Dysan, and finally, to my own independent sales organization—I’ve refined both my approach to selling and my use of computer technology—and mass marketing techniques—to maintain a steady stream of qualified prospects to make more sales.

Cerra, Joseph. Make More Sales and Make More Money (Sales Associate Personal Development Skill Series Book 1) . Kindle Edition.