You need to have objectives in mind in any endeavor in order to measure your progress on the way.
I started hitch-hiking about the same age I made my first successful sale. One difference was the objectives. Regarding my first sale, the objective was money to buy food for a dog I wanted. In hitch-hiking the only objective I had in mind for my first ride was to return home on time. The objective was just to get a ride and go somewhere instead of just standing around.
Back in 1973 Los Altos, California was a lovely community on the southern end of the San Francisco Peninsula. It was a sleepy suburb seemingly far removed from the hustle-bustle of San Francisco and the other commercial areas. All around there were fruit orchards, some vineyards, and a fair number of horses. There weren't even sidewalks on my street. We used to cut through an apricot orchard to get to Main Street. Hewlett-Packard had some buildings around, including one that was a mile long and absolutely straight. Who knew what a “Particle Accelerator” was, let alone what it did, aside from "accelerating particles," whatever that meant. There were no silicon chips growing anywhere I knew of.
You may have a successful sales career, or you may be thinking of going into sales. In either case, in a professional setting there can be a lot of pressure to make your first deal. Not so on a lazy day with nothing better to do, which I believe is a rule for management - do what you can to lighten the pressure and make it fun.
The first ride I remember getting was with my friend Bill. We were standing at the end of my block on the nearest street with any traffic. We actually didn't have to wait very long before a sweet, obviously retired, woman stopped her late model Cadillac and asked us where we were going. It was apparent the lady was out on a drive to kill time. Hey! Us too! It’s been so long now I don’t remember where we went or how we got back home, but we did. We’d accomplished our objective and demonstrated a basic tenet of sales; we asked and we received. In a classic example of a “win-win” transaction the lady gave us a ride and we gave her some company and, possibly, the satisfaction of feeling she had saved Bill and I from ourselves.
Your second sale may have come easier than the first, and so it was for me as I leveraged the experience gained from that first ride to venture further afield. I’d made a friend in Palo Alto (about 10 to 20 miles away) before moving to Los Altos my new objective was to go visit Glenn.
With this more sophisticated objective in mind I had to have a better plan. I mentally mapped out my route. From the end of my block I’d hitch-hike a ride on South El Monte (two lanes, rural, lightly traveled) the mile and a half to El Camino Real Boulevard ( a major North-South thoroughfare from San Fransisco to San Jose and beyond). From there I’d ride north ten or so miles to Palo Alto. In Palo Alto I’d go east about three miles on the Oregon Expressway to Middlefield Avenue, north to Garland Street and from there I’d walk the four or five blocks to my friend Glenn’s house. I'm pretty sure I walked to Garland Street, too.
You can see the implications; the more traffic you have the faster you get a ride, or an advance on your objective. When hitch-hiking, my chosen route wasn’t always the most direct; I had to judge where there would be traffic, or prospects. It would have been more direct to cut through the orchard to a street with more traffic than South El Monte, but there were no cars in the orchard.
I also had to walk where it was safe (and legal) for me to walk and safe for cars to stop. So while the shortest route was to go north on the Foothill Expressway to Page Mill Road and then east, there was almost no likelihood of anyone stopping for me on an expressway. I soon resigned myself to taking longer routes and to walking the slow stretches until I found a place where there was going to be more traffic.
It took a while walking down South El Monte. In a residential area the traffic is light and mostly local. The marginal cost of stopping, starting and then stopping is relatively high for folks who are nearly home. In fact, by the time I got a ride I was about half-way to El Camino Real. I’d walked halfway! We’ll come back to walking versus not walking later.
On El Camino Real I got a ride (advance) pretty quickly. And I got a good long ride too! Not only was there more traffic, but the traffic on a principal boulevard can be counted on to take longer trips. I think it’s reasonable to estimate the rides I got on El Camino were generally at least five times longer than what I would have gotten on South El Monte. This premise is obvious and is magnified when applied to highways – people on the highway are there to avoid stoplights and to travel at higher speeds because they are generally going for longer distances.
In fact, when you are only going from one end of town to the other the highway is a bad place to hitch-hike. A motorist who is ending a journey may assume you are starting yours and won’t feel they can offer you a long trip. If a motorist does stop because they want company for a long trip the company the hitch-hiker will provide has a high price relative to the marginal cost of stopping (from at least 75 miles per hour in most cases) twice in such a short distance. Your objective is out of balance with that of your prospects'.
Whatever your objectives you have to make similar calculations about who and where your best prospects are to be found. What is the price of your product? What is the price of your time? Where is the intersection that will allow you to make the best profit? If you are selling brushes or magazines you may be able to go door to door. If you are selling Credit Card Processing you may be successful going directly from one business to another. If you are selling bigger ticket items then you will have to spend more time with your map before setting out. More sophisticated objectives require more prior mapping.
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