No School Like Old School…

Back from Memphis, and getting ready for North Carolina Motorcoach and ABA. As always, Tennessee Motorcoach was a fun time, and very positive. The Operators in Tennessee are very open, very honest, and very interested, and ya can’t ask for anything more than that!

But what really set me to thinking was something that happened the final evening (and seems to happen at just about every convention at one time or another). I was sitting with some “old school” group sales professionals, and they started telling stories about shows in the past. It’s funny…when my Dad would start doing this, it prompted instant eye rolling and tongue clucking from the three sons, and a quick exodus from the room. After all, who cares about such old fashioned stuff?

But it hit me…I teach about Group Sales to anyone who will listen. I created a seminar program to help spread the word about my favorite job. And what do I teach? I teach what I learned from those who went before me. In other industries, there is always a “cutting edge”…those people stretching the envelope, coming up with new ways to attack an old problem. In our industry, while there are people coming up with great new ideas (like Dave Bolen from New World Tours, and his amazing 21st Century motorcoaches!), the vast majority of group sales is just like it was 20 years ago. One on one relationships.

That’s probably why I could sit and listen for hours, and have done so in the past. The people who taught me this business, like Joan Payne, Jeanne Vice, Barry Kidd, and the lady I sat with at Tennessee Motorcoach, the one-and-only Pamela Huey, have literally done it all. They have so many experiences, sometimes I think I should sit with them with a pocket recorder, and capture it all before we lose their insights and stories.

So it’s Old School for me, and please keep the stories coming! There’s a wealth of knowledge hidden inside those memories!

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This entry was posted on January 21, 2008 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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