This is the 68th in a series of business tips from industry leaders that Enterprise Times has interviewed. Enterprise Times recently interviewed Kevin Stilwell, Channel Sales Manager of SYSPRO, EMEA. Stillwell revealed how he intends to expand the presence of SYSPRO in the UK market by increasing brand awareness and growing the number of partners the ERP vendor has in the region.
I asked Kevin about the best tip he received during his career.
He replied, “It’s not a tip, but it’s something that happened to me when I was 21. (It was) my first day working for Xerox. I did six months of training, and then I went on territory. Our office was on the corner of the slough business estate, which is massive. It was the biggest one in Europe. There were two of us, and my sales manager said to us, John, you need to go and park on the opposite side; Kevin, you need to start here. Here is the map of the businesses. You knock on the door, go into reception, say you are from Xerox and ask for the name of the person in charge of procurement of machinery.
“We would go in and try and get a business card or a compliment slip. We did that for three weeks, about 700 companies, and gave it all to marketing. We came back in on Monday morning and said what do we do now, boss? He said, now you need to swap over. You need to do it again. About 3-4 weeks later, it was incredible how different it was. We got leads from the first lot, and we got leads from the second one. People who had said we are not interested would actually say yes. For me, when someone says they are not ready to do something, it’s a snapshot at that point in time.”
