Sometimes we would play hangman. You know the game. You pick a word like “heifer” which is spelled with six letters. Then you make six blanks on the paper and draw a hangman’s platform. The other person guesses a letter and if he misses you draw one element of the hanging scene. If you finish the scene with a stick man hanging from a noose before your opponent spells the word, you win.
My Pa would show up and pontificate, “How can you waste your time with that “dad damn tom foolery”. You can never get this time back. A minute saved is a minute earned. Now, git out there and feed the chickens.”
Pa would light in to me about being a “laggard”. That name “Laggard the Louse” stuck for a long time until the mid 1980’s, while I was writing for this very magazine, a snooty editor called me the “Maňana Man” referring to the fact that I was eleven days late with my column and she was thinking that I no habla espaňol so I wouldn’t be insulted. Little did she know that I had taken Spanish I three time while I was procrastinating my way through college. Unfortunately, I never passed the course but I did learn to order food, drink and the meaning of Maňana.
I came by Maňana Man honestly. In my younger days, I perfected making sales calls while totally unprepared and sometimes hung over. Luckily, the good Lord blessed me with spontaneity, good questioning skills and superb listening skills. As I have said so many times that some of you may want to throw up, “I listened my way into more sales than I ever talked my way into.”
But, this column is not about me.
It’s about you and your need to tune out all the bad news you are hearing about the economy and your boss repeatedly yelling at you for “sales, sales, sales”.
You need to obliterate your worry about your house being underwater (Marvelle that means you owe more than the house is worth) and being three months past due on the house notes. You’ve got to wipe out your memory of the repo man taking the Corvette and your 21’ fishing boat and the RV.
You need to forget about your best friend taking off with your wife (which was not so bad) but he also took your pickup and your dog was asleep in the back. I know how you miss that dog.
You are all just flooded with bad news lately and I’ve got some prescriptions to ease the pain and I’m not talking about Percocet or Jack Daniels. I’m talking about relying on the Great Time Wasters.
I’m gonna give you the Maňana Man’s Great Time Waster Hall of Fame. Things you can do to look busy at your desk in the sales department of your printing company.
I’m not talking about tic tac toe or connect the dots, or my affinity for checkers or Chinese checkers. Those wasters are time worn – passé. We live in a digital Worldwide Web World and I’m going to list stuff you can do on your desktop and/or laptop.
I’m talking first about Facebook as a great time waster. Go ahead, log on to HYPERLINK "http://www.facebook.com" www.facebook.com and register if you haven’t already. You can install, er upload, your photo, actually lots of photos if you want and this takes a lot of time. You will be mesmerized for hours and hours. Soon you will have people who want to “friend” you and you have to formally and electronically accept them as friends. Then you can write on their walls with news about yourself. I’ve heard of people with hundreds of friends who learned the advantages of killing time by “friending” as many people as possible. It makes you feel good about yourself to say, “I’ve got 347 friends”.
And, you know what? Two or three of them may actually buy some printing or know someone who buys printing. Wait ‘til your boss hears that this is actually prospecting.
Facebook is a “social network”.
The newest and hottest “social network” is called Twitter. They call it a “social messaging utility” or a place for micro blogs. This is the one all the politicians and other famous people prefer and you will too.
I’ll wait a minute while you log on to HYPERLINK "http://www.twitter.com" www.twitter.com and register, if you haven’t already. Like Facebook, Twitter is free and once you are logged in you can type HYPERLINK "http://www.twitter.com/barackobama" www.twitter.com/barackobama and read what the President is doing. Wow! I haven’t checked but I’ll bet Republicans and Democrats alike are tweeting or is it twittering.
Twitter gives you a soap box and you can get all your opinions off your chest. You can provide your Twitter address and your Facebook address to all your customers and prospects and they can really get to know you. They will learn all your opinions and politics and see what you stand for.
Twitter and Facebook should consume about 4 to 6 hours daily.
Don’t forget lunch. That should kill another 60 – 90 minutes.
Now you need to relax with some on-line games.
There are games on the Internet where you can play against other people in the U.S. or even foreign lands. Try Backgammon, Chess or Internet poker. It’s good healthy competition. The hours will fly by and you will never once think about all the bad news.
Or, if you are a loner, an anti-social introvert, try Solitaire, Mahjong, Spider or Minesweeper. If you space these games strategically using smart strategery and you have killed the whole day and NEVER ONCE HAD A BAD THOUGHT!
Don’t forget to Google yourself a few times every day. You never can tell when Google reports that you did something and you should be the first to know.
Didya notice that I didn’t recommend bridge or chess? I never learned how to play these hard games and they are too obvious to play in the office unless you play the digital versions on your PC. Wasting time on your computer is safer because if your boss shows up, you can minimize your screen to reveal a list of prospects.
Before you know it these bad times will pass and the orders will start flowing in again. Don’t worry; your competitors’ salespeople are wasting their time while you’ve have made lots of new friends on the Internet.
Now I have really helped you. Remember to make up excuses for not making any calls or reasons for your poor sales results. You are a salesperson and good at making up reasons for your poor performance. For example you can say, “We’re in a recession. Haven’t you heard?”
Just keep cashing those checks for your draw and prepare a strong argument if the boss threatens to reduce the draw. Or, even worse, if he threatens to fire you, remind him that print salespeople are hard to find.
Now, for the rest of you, I’m talking about the 20% of print salespeople who sell 80% of the printing sold anywhere, I know, even in these bad times, you will work twice as hard and smart and you will get out there and sell something!
