Imagine your feelings in this situation: new on the job, no results to bring to the table, no understanding of sales, and you want to negotiate an assigned territory to give you the best chance of success.

Are you looking forward to this or do you want to avoid the negotiations?

When I first entered sales in the computer industry, it was a male dominated industry. This was an influencing factor in my success from the beginning.

In my first sales job, we were assigned specific lines of business. Each year, if a salesperson was not effective in their assigned lines, those target customers would be reassigned. The manager would call us in his office by overall sales results.

But in my first year of sales, without any company sales results, I was to negotiate my assigned lines of business with a different approach. It would be about a year later when I could use my position of being a top salesperson to get the better lines of business.

Waiting for...