6/24/2011 9:06 AM
I will shed a little light on this. Although I am in a management position and my primary focus is not sales, I try to get out one day a week and meet with Superintendents and Sports Turf Managers to introduce them to our line of organic products. I e-mail the people I would like to see two or three days in advance requesting an appointment, then I try to follow up with a phone call. I think I am pretty accurate when I say I get responses from about 10% of the people I contact. When I am fortunate enough to get an appointment with someone, about half of them are not there when I show up.
I know we are all busy and as a former Superintendent I have a tremendous amount of respect for people's time. That is why I always request an appointment. I know my primary focus should be pushing our product but when I meet with a lot of people, I spend most of my time trying to help them out with something else. I can't begin to tell you how much fertilizer I have given away because someone didn't have money in their budget. I just want to help anyway that I can, and it might not have anything to do with our products.
I don't think I could do that every day. It's hard enough doing it one day a week and you spend a half a day making phone calls and e-mails to try to get 5 or 6 appointments.