Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It's been a mellow workday in Phoenix today. I was about to write "easy workday" but then I reconsidered. It has not been easy, per se. I was up early this morning to travel, and then I met with a major client, a company whose name is on a credit card well over 100,000,000 people own, for almost three hours this afternoon. Some people would find that challenging or draining, but I find it invigorating. Well, not the getting up early for a flight part. But overall the day has been mellow. Here are more details.

My flight to Phoenix was uneventful. "Boring flight," I remarked to the captain as I left the airplane. "Thank you, Captain!"

On the ground at PHX I cooled my heels for a bit at the airport waiting for my colleague, Mike. Mike was on a later flight arriving from SoCal. I used my alone time to get a proper breakfast—pepperoni pizza— in a seat where I could stretch my arms and legs as much as I wanted. Then I met Mike. We chatted for a bit and responded to time-sensitive emails as we shared a table at Starbucks. (Mike's a coffee fiend.) Then we hailed a car to the customer's office.

Our meeting with the customer ran long, almost three hours total. That includes us driving to lunch together and continuing our discussions over lunch. It was a very positive meeting. The folks we met were mostly technical practitioners plus two of technical managers. I mention this because often discussions with an audience like this become strictly technical— talking bits and bytes, when's the next release coming, what's the status of bug #555123, etc. It's a common pitfall a lot of people in our sales organization fall into. But I'm really good at up-leveling technical conversations to business conversations, and Mike, as an account executive, is really good at speaking "tech" enough to be credible. We both work together to shape the convo back out of the weeds with questions like, "What's the impact of that on the business?" and "How does that align to the objectives you're measured against?"

As a result we elicited a really good understanding of what this customer's main priorities for the coming year are, what some of their friction points on implementing new technology from us are, and how we can work together to overcome those obstacles. Mike remarked as we rode to the hotel after our late lunch, "I think we learned more of value about this customer just today than almost any other sales team in the past 4 years has.'

We arrived at our hotel around 3:30pm. Why a hotel and not fly home tonight? We're staying through the next few days for a sales training seminar. We're at a resort over in Scottsdale. Now, when I say "resort" you might start imagining some kind of boondoggle. No, it's not like that. It's a quiet but modestly upscale hotel with a few pools. And no, not the kind with a lazy river or water slides.

The weather's nice today— it's only in the 80s as a high here in Phoenix (and 100° by Friday!) — but I may or may not go out for a dip in those pools. So far I've been content relaxing in my room. I may head out for a very light supper later and see if I can find a few colleagues at the bar— let me rephrase that: see which colleagues I can find at the bar— for a round or two of drinks before going to bed at a reasonable hour this evening.