Sales Bachelors

Mileage reimbursement is available for those employees who periodically, or routinely use their personal vehicles for company business, and as such have a monthly allocation in their job description for it. These employees include, but are not limited to: Sales personnel who regularly make outside sales calls that requires driving to a customer project site or office location Office personnel who are asked to run errands for the Company such as making bank deposits or picking up supplies Personnel who travel to/from quarries For a visual of this process, see the Scribe in External Links (bottom of this page). On your Odoo employee agreement, on the Benefits tab, you will see a line item that reflect the monthly amount you are allowed for mileage. This amount is also in the language of your job description. Reimbursement Request Log In External Links below, you will find a Google spreadsheet you can use as a reimbursement request form. Make a COPY on your personal drive for use. In the mileage log, include: Date of travel Beginning mileage - Mileage Out Ending mileage - Mileage In Total miles traveled Business purpose of the trip Companies/Individuals visited on the trip Submission Submit an HR Expense in Odoo at HR > HR Expenses, and attach a copy of the spreadsheet (External Links). You can submit as needed, so long as the total does not exceed your monthly cap. Deadlines Submit your expense within 2 weeks of the end of the week or month when the business travel occurred. Submit once a calendar month, for miles that accrued during that month. Except under extenuating circumstances, if you fail to turn in a request for reimbursement for more than 30-days after the business travel, no reimbursement will be made. Reimbursement Rate The reimbursement rate for all employees of the company using their personal vehicle for company use is: $0.55/mile This rate is subject to review on a periodic basis. Company reimbursement is not intended to take into account all of the elements included in the IRS mileage reimbursement guideline. As a traveling employee, you may be eligible to further reduce your taxable income using the difference between the standard IRS deduction and the Company.

by Mike Shultz and John Doerr Book Review by Dan Thomas 11/14/2014 In my career I have studied Zig Ziglar's Secrets of selling, Spin Selling by Neil Rackham, and most recently, Action Selling by Duane Sparks. Each of these sales methods were very successful in their time, and I learned a lot from them. However, today’s customers are evolving and to continue to serve these new customers who are generally educated about products in a way customers of previous generations could hardly imagine, our sales methods need to evolve as well. The new method is truly a “next-generation” evolution, and to be a top performer in today’s selling marketplace you have to master both the skills of the past and a new set of skills. Insight Selling is the sales skillset and methodology aimed at serving today's educated customers. I have to be honest, I didn’t get much out of the first half of the book, Insight Selling, but I really enjoyed reading the second half of the book. I think it took me half the book to realize that Insight wasn’t just going to be another method telling me to throw out all the old training I had invested in and start over with their new method. Once I realized this, I became a lot more open to gleaning what insight I could from the text. As I pondered on my own experiences selling, I found many of Shultz and Doerr’s claims about customers to be true. Customers are more educated, they are interacting with traditional sales forces much later on in the process, and many of the products they buy have become commoditized. I have personally wondered what to do about this and how I should prepare myself for the same trend taking over in my industry. Thankfully, Shultz and Doerr have thought about it much more than me and they have shared their insights throughout their work. One of the things I liked that Shultz and Doerr recommend was to be an insight seller you need to move ahead of the traditional sales cycle. We have tried to do the same thing in our business selling stone and landscaping supplies but I think we’ve missed the mark. We have been trying to work with Architects for the last couple years with limited success. Mostly our efforts marketing to them have involved us buying lots of lunches and telling architects our company spiel. I felt sheepish when Insight Selling specifically pointed this out as a poor means for sales success. Instead, Shultz and Doerr teach that we should work with Architects to become their expert partners and collaborators. Our efforts to sell to our contractor customers haven't been much better. After reading Insight Selling, I’m going to ban our standard sales line: “Do you have any projects we can bid for you?” Instead, Insight Selling teaches that we should be building relationships of trust, such that when a stone project comes up they are coming to us asking for advice and recommendations. Insight Selling breaks down the sales process into three main categories: Connect, Convince, and Collaborate. Previously our sales efforts stopped after convincing the customer to use our products. Moving forward we are going to have to move to the Collaborate phase much more often with our customers. For Architects, this would mean working with them to understand what stone would best work to express their clients’ aspirations. For Contractors, this would mean helping them design and learn methods of installation, or new uses for stone they haven’t attempted before. Near the end of Insight Selling, Shultz and Doerr outline the profile of an insight seller. The profile is made up of skills, knowledge, and attributes needed to excel at selling as well as the problems and implications when a seller is lacking in a key area. Some of these should be used for hiring, but most all of them should be used as a part of a continual training and assessment program. I am really looking forward to using these attributes and competencies to update our hiring practices, as well as how we assess salesperson potential. Insight Selling ended with a number of mistakes companies make when implementing sales training. (I found it peculiar that a sales program included a chapter about why sales training programs fail.) In our company we have definitely under-invested in sales training. We have gone through the “train and then don’t support” cycle for more than one training program. Moving forward, I want to get our company to start budgeting a certain dollar amount every year for sales training and improvement. I think the insights, studies, and models delivered in this book will help us well on our way to becoming a sales company in the 21st century. Note: Action Selling is part of our training program for American Stone, and you'll find this module in our eLearning Series.

by Charles Coonradt Book review by Elizabeth Thomas Charles Coonradt's The Game of Work series corresponds with the ideas that got him called "The Grandfather of Gamification" by Forbes in 2012. His main concept is that when people play sports, they work hard in practice ... and they enjoy it. Coonradt thinks if we change our approach to work, it could also feel more like play. We will work harder and get better results. Key to the concept is having goals, keeping score, and giving/getting frequent feedback on performance. According to Coonradt, what separates America's wealthiest from its paycheck-to-paycheck citizens is that they set goals and have plans for achieving them. He gives several ideas about how to measure and keep track of goals, as well as advice on the manager-employee relationship so there is growth for the employee. Easy to understand, not long, but it took me a while to read because 1) I had to stop frequently to digest and 2) I was discussing it with my husband throughout.