According to Dave Airey, VP of Sales and Marketing at OTI, “We started looking for a way to move our application to a GUI “look and feel,” but after two years of investigation it became obvious that it was not a practical goal. As an alternative we investigated upgrading our legacy application to a new product.”

OTI’s requirements for a new system revolved around their customers. After many years of custom changes, legacy system was geared to client requirements.

Airey noted, “OTI’s initial search took us to major ERP players, but none had features we required to support our loyal customers.”

Finding an ERP System with Strong Functionality: The search for a new ERP system ended when OTI was introduced to PRONTO North America (www.PRONTOerp.com). According to Airey, “We were introduced to Pronto and were immediately impressed with rich functionality. One important feature was that Pronto is fully integrated. We had engineered our legacy system to be fully integrated so this was of major importance.”

When I started my sales career over 25 years ago, I worked for a small company selling telephone answering equipment. Hard to believe it but in those days I had to explain to prospects what equipment was for and why they might want to use it.

The company I worked for got business in several different ways. First each of 4 sales people handled incoming calls and also made calls to people he/she thought could use equipment. The company advertised so sometimes people called in to inquire about products we offered. Finally manufacturers of equipment sent company names of people (leads) who called manufacturer because they were interested in equipment.

No one particularly liked making cold calls so if we could get an incoming call we took it hoping it was a potential customer. Cold calling was part of job however so I learned to do it in a way that made it a game. One of other sales people really hated making calls so he very rarely made any.

Instead of calling this fellow would complain to whoever was available that company didn’t provide good leads, that company should advertise more so people would know what equipment was, and that company should move its location to a high traffic mall so we would get walk in traffic. (We were located in a building that housed mattress factory of parents of owner!)

Needless to say he didn’t make many sales but it always struck me that he truly believed problem was with company not with himself.

Jack Canfield in his book The Success Principles says, “If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes level of your achievements, results you produce, quality of your relationships, state of your health and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings—everything!”

The fellow may have been right about company and its support (or lack of support) of sales but he couldn’t change that. It didn’t help any of us that he continually complained about leads, location, and lack of advertising. He needed to take responsibility for his own sales process and begin to think about possibilities not problems.