The Toughest Job in Sales: Making Business Travel Bearable

Getting a job in sales usually comes with one somber side effect. Business travel.

Unless you’re applying for a job where clients come to your brick-and-mortar building to conduct all their business meetings, you are likely to have at least a little bit of travel in your sales career. And although you may think business travel will be fun, you will change your mind about that once you’ve had to do it for any appreciable length of time.

The novelty of business travel will wear off soon, but that doesn’t mean it has to be unbearable. Whether you are a seasoned veteran looking for a new job or a rookie hoping for his first assignment, you can benefit from these three crucial travel pointers:

Balance Efficiency and Effectiveness: Depending on how dense your client base is within the geography you have to cover, you will have a lot of decisions to make about how best to work the territory. Most salespeople make the mistake of letting geography primarily determine how they’ll go about implementing their call plan (the routes they use when planning sales visits). Instead, salespeople should be taking geography into consideration as they draw up their call routes, and worry more about being effective than being efficient. For example, it may be very efficient to visit ABC company only on the same day that XYZ company gets a visit, because the two firms are right across the street from each other. But if a key contact at XYZ is only available two days after a planned ABC visit, then strong consideration should be given to coming back around to see XYZ later in the same week. Otherwise, opportunities at XYZ could be missed in the time it takes to get back to the area, and all for the sake of being “efficient.”

Reap the Rewards: In addition to the attractive salary and commissions that a job in sales can provide, there are additional compensations for the hardships of travel. These are most easily recognized through travel reward programs that hotels, airlines and credit card companies offer. Unless your company mandates a particular airline or hotel chain, you should sign up for every single program you can find. Take it one step further and target your hotel stays according to the point promotions each chain invariably offers from time to time. This kind of forethought can lead to fabulous vacations that are completely funded by the points you earn while traveling. Example: Hyatt offers special bonus points at select hotel locations that can triple the speed at which you earn rewards. However, they aren’t just automatically bestowed; you have to hunt for them a little. Travelers qualify for these special bonuses by visiting the “Bonus Offers” page on the Hyatt Gold Passport site, and looking for hotels in the destination city that have an active bonus. By using this strategy, an account that has 4-5,000 points in it can expand to 50,000 points in just a few months.

By All Means, Have a Plan: The saying goes like this: one hour in the office should save you three on the road. Especially with new salespeople, there is a tendency to rush out the door and fall into the trap of thinking that sales calls have to be made every minute of the day. But salespeople are not paid to make sales calls, they are paid to get optimum results! And optimum results require an optimum plan, one that includes thoughtful strategies for maximizing time in the field as well as clear objectives for every visit. You can’t effectively develop these strategies and objectives unless you are willing to set aside time in the office to establish them. That doesn’t mean you should be camping out with your feet on your desk, but without these fundamentals, you risk turning yourself into little more than a tourist.

A job in sales has the potential to be more rewarding than any other career you could imagine. Some estimates place the sales profession at the third-highest rank (behind entrepreneurs and high level professionals like tort lawyers and doctors) when it comes to identifying where the world’s wealth is held. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, especially with pitfalls like having to travel a significant amount of time.

Even at that, with a little forethought, planning and creativity, you can work to minimize the hassles of business travel and turn them into some very nice bonuses indeed.

By: David DiCola

David DiCola is a 20-year management veteran and the author of Customer Golf – The Short Game, a novel about overcoming obstacles in business and in golf.