Thanks to all of you that participated in the poll I posted a week ago that asked the following question:
“If you were handed $1,000 with the only requirement being that you had to put it into your sales career, where would it go?”
I intentionally used an open text field for your responses to give you the most flexibility in your answer. I have taken the liberty to read through the 67 responses and broken them down into the following buckets of answers starting from the least common to the most common.
#9 – Medical Marijuana ( only one response for this, but I enjoyed the creativity!)
#8 – Clothing/Appearance ( new suits, makeover, Lasik)
#7 – Gas Money
#6 – Books/CD’s/DVD’s (could be added into the Training bucket but many categories included)
#5 – Travel (leisure/vacation mostly to re-charge)
#4 – Training (Social Media was #1 in this bucket)
#3 – Professional tools (Association memberships, Luggage, Organization memberships (networking & social)
#2 – Sales/Marketing software/tools (automation tools #1, CRM, Constant Contact & other email service providers, dozens of Web Tools, several answered with Premium LinkedIn account here)
#1 – Technology Hardware (iPad #1 in this bucket, Tablet #2, Laptop, Mobile Broadband, LCD Projectors and Smartphones all received several votes)
A couple of things stood out for me with the responses:
- iPad/Tablets are clearly on the wishlist of many in sales. If you are a web tool vendor, you better be thinking of how your solution can be optimized for a tablet experience.
- Training was only #4 in responses. With the significant shift in Buyer expectations and activity, how will we learn about these new philosophies and strategies to meet these changing expectation?
- Wow did I relate to #5 Travel responses for vacation. It has been way too long.
How about you, what do you think of the responses and which bucket is/was/should be your answer?