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Last week I had a harsh dose of reality. I have a customer who had cut a purchase order and was ready to procure our services. Sounds great, right? It was. It felt pretty good when I first got the PO. These guys promised it would be in my hands day after day. We were coming into the end of the month and I was beginning to believe I would never receive it. Sure enough, it showed up in my inbox. Soon thereafter the e-mails and incessant phone calls would begin. Ordinarily this would not be such a big deal but in this instance the customer is in India, I am in California and our developers are in Spain. I would get an answer, wait for the call from India, relay answers to the customer and receive a new question for the engineers in Spain. This happened several times in a 24-hour period. The waiting game was a nightmare.

I think any salesperson can relate to this reality. It’s the common “everybody in the boat rowing” mentality and I am happy to be the intermediary; ESPECIALLY when there is a larger deal on the horizon. So I happily answered the 1:00am phone calls from India and chatted with the engineers just hours later in Spain. It is not a huge deal until you realize how much time is being wasted and little is being accomplished.

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