HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN A DOCTOR

I had the pleasure of having coffee with an old and dear friend of mine today. Although we talk on a regular basis, we hadn’t seen each other in over 2 years. Like so many people we met at a Starbucks that was about half way between his home and mine. He arrived first and had a table waiting for me, after a big hello and a 10 minute wait for an overpriced cup of coffee I sat down with him. I immediately noticed that he had brought a pad and pen with him and had it out and ready. I felt unprepared, I didn’t bring my portfolio with me.

It was great seeing him again and we talked about a dozen things while I sipped my coffee. All the while he kept writing things down. After about an hour and his 3^rd sheet of paper I asked what he was writing so diligently. He told me that his wife will want to know everything we talked about and he wanted to have all the information. (My wife Jackie and his wife have been friends as long as we have been)

So I asked what he had written down and he flipped back to page one and started covering our conversation. It only took about 15 seconds before he first said, “I can’t read my own writing”. Then it seemed like he said it every 10 seconds or so. We had a good laugh about what he was going to tell his wife Linda and I made a joke that she was going to think he was having an affair because he had such awful notes.

We sat and talked for well over 3 hours and finally departed Starbucks. It was great seeing him and we both said the words that we all say in situations like this, “We need to do this again and next time it shouldn’t take 2 years”. We both promised to make sure it didn’t, I hope we make an effort to keep this promise.

When I got home my wife wanted to know what we spoke about (sound familiar) without notes I reconstructed our meeting right down to the overpriced coffee. We both laughed when I told her about his handwriting and inability to read the notes he took. That is when I realized I had been in this situation many times before.

It struck me that I have been with reps that pull out notepads and can’t read their own writing. It is one thing to miss a detail about a meeting between 2 old friends, but to miss details about a sales call can hurt not only you, but your client and company as well.

I tell reps all the time that taking notes during a sales call is a great idea. No prospect or customer will mind you jotting down things as you talk, as a matter of fact they will appreciate the fact that you want to remember details and are taking the notes. However, if you can’t read your own handwriting, than you might as well not have taken the notes. It looks so worse if you write something down and still get it wrong than just getting it wrong without notes.

So here is my solution to poor handwriting, a pocket recorder. For as little as $10 you can buy a digital recorder which will hold an hour of messages. After the sales call you can get into your car and while the information is fresh make the voice notes you need. At the end of the day play them back and you will have all the information you need.

A few tips on buying a recorder. Make sure the recorder stores each message as a separate message. This is important because you want to be able to delete messages. If all the messages are stored as one file it makes deleting difficult and in some cases impossible. Buy a recorder with “one touch recording”, this way you can be driving and as you see something like a new business or think of something you can easily record the note.

I know what many of you are thinking, you smart phones have recorders, why not just use them? First in most cases you need to navigate a menu to get to the recorder and this isn’t easy driving at 70MPH in traffic. Secondly, in many cases our phone batteries are overtaxed keeping up with our e mails, text messages and oh yes, phone calls. Recording takes a lot of battery power and will make the battery life even shorter. My final reason is I don’t like bringing my cell phone into a sales call with me. I leave it in the car. If I want to record a note I will need to form the habit of bringing my cell phone in with me, this could cause other problems like a ringing phone during a sales presentation.

It is true, a short pencil is much better than a long memory, but bad handwriting trumps this every time.

Lorin