In April of 1998 I was living in Mobile, AL to be near my father after being apart for nearly a decade as I was serving in far away places in the Air Force.

My first-born was 11 months old and my wife was about to deliver our second child, another boy, any day. (Don’t believe that old wive’s tale about not being able to get pregnant while breast feeding. Two boys 360 days apart proves that just ain’t so!)

A unique turn of events (and a 3-year arbitration case that I eventually, painfully and anticlimactically won) led me to the desk of Sam Payton, GM of Oakwood Homes on Moffett Rd in the northern part of Mobile, AL.

Sam Payton knew trailers. He also knew how to teach a hungry, motivated kid how to sell trailers. We hit it off right away and I started selling for him less than 5 days later.

Selling mobile homes is retail sales, plain and simple. We were open 7 days a week and we were vertically integrated. What that means is that we manufactured the mobile homes, owned the retail center and owned the financing.

That was both good and bad for sales people. It was good because if we could get the prospect qualified we could sell a higher-priced trailer with lower payments if we knew how to work with the finance department to structure the loans.

It was bad news if you were lazy and didn’t want to take the time to master the intricacies of sales, trade-ins, down payments, land-home packages, credit scores, interest rates and finance.

The way retail stores share leads is via a complex algorithm known in the industry as the “Up System.” We had a (high tech, environmentally-friendly, low-fume-emitting) grease board just inside the front door on the wall. The first sales person in that day put his name on the top of the list.

That meant he got the first visitor to the lot that day, which we called an “up,” as in, “Wes, A 1984 Ford Escort with duct tape on the windows and chicken wire holding up the muffler just pulled into the parking lot. You’re UP!”(I wish I was exaggerating.)

Being highly competitive and highly motivated (and being a morning person) I had no problem being the first one in each and every day. I also kept a supply of dry erase pens in my desk and my car to make sure I had one handy as soon as I walked in the front door. (I also broke a few land speed records racing co-workers into the office if I saw them on Moffett Rd, but that’s another story.)

Which brings me to the two-part moral of this story:

1. More opportunities equals more money. With 5 of us working the store at any one time I did some simple math and realized that the 5th guy in that day needed 10 prospects to show up to get 2 opportunities, whereas the first guy in that day only needed 6 to pull into the store. I’m not a math wizard but that 5th guy needs a 66% increase in traffic to have the same income-earning potential as the 1st guy, which is a heck-uv-a big increase in traffic! So I was always the first one in because I wanted and needed to make more money.
2. Never assume the purchasing ability of the prospect. Many of those smoke-billowing vehicles that pulled into the lot had enough money to buy a $20,000 mobile home with a 20-year mortgage. Many of the fancy-pants cars that pulled up were owned by people that were over-leveraged and couldn’t get a loan because their debt-to-income ratios were too high. I greeted them all the same. I followed the same sales process Oakwood Homes taught me.

In fact, one of my best clients-turned-referral partner was a good-ol’ boy that pulled up in an average pick up truck wearing Red Wing boots, a sweaty T-shirt and Wrangler jeans with a Copenhagen ring in his back pocket. Nobody wanted that “up” so I took him.

Turns out he owned his own septic tank installation business and was good with his money. (He didn’t do septic tank maintenance. That was too messy. He just installed new ones.)

He had a flatbed trailer, a Bobcat, a backhoe and a crew of two…and he made more money than he could count. His wife drove a Mercedes. They lived on a ranch and raised thoroughbred race horses. And he had a lot of names of people that needed trailers and he sent them to me! (Guess who I had install the septic tanks for all of my other clients?)

The Result?

I made $100,000 the first 12 months I worked there. It was the first time I ever made that much money (I made $20,000 in January 1999 alone) and let me tell ya somethin’, $100,000 in Mobile, AL in 1998 when we were paying $365/mo for a 2 bedroom apartment goes A LOOOONG way!

In July of 1999, less than 15 months after I started working there, I was promoted to GM and given my own store with hiring and firing and P&L and marketing and inventory control. (I inherited a $63,000 PER MONTH deficit, which is the material for another post.)

The money and the promotions and the experiences came my way because I showed up early, stayed late and didn’t assume anything about my prospects.

What assumptions are holding you back? Do you assume people don’t have money? Do you assume people don’t need what you offer? Do you assume the competition has a better doo-hickey than you do? The people my co-workers assumed were good or bad prospects usually turned out to be incorrect. Which is partly why they’re still average sales people showing up late, getting fewer “ups” and complaining about people not having money.

Do you have a similar story? Let me know below.