Company Contact – Have A Plan
Posted on | February 17, 2007 | 4 Comments
The whole day has been devoted to wrapping up the manual update. My post for today is a page written for the company information chapter. Here is the intro.Â
One out of a hundred. Boy things are looking good. You’ve contacted ninety nine companies and have been received with courtesy and enthusiasm. You’ve even gotten a few assignments. Great!
It would be nice if you could just stop here but you can’t, and you won’t. You are going to call that one hundredth company. It would be nice if you had stopped at ninety nine because you’re going to find that one out of a hundred companies that is just waiting for you to call so they can blind you with bright promises and lead you off to their labor camp.
It truly is one out of a hundred. Maybe it’s one out of two hundred now but it has not been that long ago when it was one out of fifty or even one out of twenty five. If there is one overwhelming motivating factor that had me go ahead and get this manual together, it was the one out of a hundred companies that were tearing the flesh off the bones of new reps!
Every rep on the planet would gasp and proclaim to the new gal “you didn’t know about those so and so’s?” Well, no. How would the new gal know? All she had was a list of companies she bought for twenty five bucks and only just now found this golly gee whiz group where all the field reps hang out.
Listen to how yours truly got eaten alive – and I knew better! I accepted about five hundred assignments from a company with a terrible reputation. I figured I was experienced enough to survive. Boy was I taught a lesson.
After working myself to death doing the five hundred inspections in about a week, they said I owed them fifteen hundred bucks! How? I was charged back for just about every one of the assignments because their computer said I was late returning the results. The fact that the previous reps name and assigned rep ID were still on the forms had absolutely no influence.
I had been sent the assignments after that rep failed to perform. I never got paid but was thankful to be rid of them. Of course, that is exactly what they were counting on.
This has been a lot of talk to tell you to slow down and have a plan. You will need to know what types of inspections each company markets and by all means you need to know something about the companies.
Plan, plan, plan!
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February 18th, 2007 @ 3:40 pm
Terry,
I just got done going through the company contact list in the manual and clicking on the web site of any that had a link in their listing. If they had any information on becoming an I/C for them, I looked it over. Two companies required basic proficiency in MS Word(which I can understand) and MS Excel. Why Excel?
By the way, in regards to your camera search, I found a site that seems to offer clear, easy to understand and (I think) unbiased reviews of cameras. Its called
My Product Advisor.
February 18th, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
It has been a long while since I had to do any field services work in Excel. Years ago, a lot of companies wanted your work in Excel because they imported your work into a spreadsheet at their office. That is how they kept track of everything – in a spreadsheet.
I did do quite a bit of work for HUD last year, and a lot of that was in Excel. Maybe they are doing HUD work.
I’m going to check out My Product Advisor.
August 15th, 2007 @ 1:08 pm
What is the best camera to use for the inspections? I have a great sony mavica which uses floppy discs, will that do? Teri
August 16th, 2007 @ 9:43 am
I think just about any digital camera will do the job. I have known field reps that lost or broke a camera and stopped in for a throw-a-way $39 digital camera at the local drug store.
There are features that save time and money and make our jobs easier. The most important to me are what I call recovery time – how long do I have to wait to take the next picture, and real optics zoom – digital zoom does not do me much good.