Sales Training in Phoenix

Well, it's been two days of sales training at the Scottsdale Plaza resort hotel in Phoenix. Like my first evening here, the balance of the two day stay has been mellow.

How was it mellow? It was mellow because it was well paced. Sales training seminars are often stuffed to the gills with content, as leaders frequently try to cram what ought to be 3 days of material and exercises into just 2 days to reduce cost and interruption. Fortunately my company's leadership the past few years has not been like that. Our last several rounds of training seminars have all been right-sized.

Part of what made this one successful was the dry-run training we did 8 weeks ago. That gave leaders are chance to test out the material with a small, seelct group of seasoned team members who could give constructive feedback. Even based on that I was concerned this two-day seminar needed to be 3 days, but the first two days were streamlined neatly into 1 full day (yesterday) so that what otherwise would have spread into day 3 could be done today, day 2. Now, yesterday's Day 1 did feel like Death By Powerpoint by mid-afternoon. But at least we finished by 5pm. And today we even finished up just after 3pm, instead of running up to 5pm. That helps for all of us catching flights home tonight!

Delayed Flying Home from Phoenix

My two days of sales training in Phoenix finished up two hours early today. "Great, now I don't have to hot-foot it to the airport during rush hour to catch my 6:50pm flight," I said. While many of colleagues took advantage of the unscheduled time to stay behind at the hotel and enjoy a round or two at the bar before leaving for the airport, I just called a car right away— well, "right away" after chatting with colleagues outside the meeting rooms for about 20 minutes. I figured if I were going to relax and have a beer somewhere, I'd do at the airport. Two colleagues who agreed with me shared my ride.

🎵 Rolling, Rolling, Rolling on the Delays 🎵

When I left the hotel about 3:30pm I already knew my flight was delayed. At 1:30pm already Southwest was showing that the flight would be delayed.



At first it was just a few minutes. It's going to get worse, I told myself. It's a rolling delay. First they notify that it's a few minutes late, then it's 10 minutes late, then 15... until eventually it could be an hour or more. Why don't they just admit up front how far behind they're running instead of acting like maybe, just maybe, today only, the hand of god will come down and turn back the clocks so that Southwest gets its operations back on schedule.

Thankfully today's rolling delays didn't roll out to an hour or more. The roll stopped at 36 minutes. The net of it was I got home— as in, walking through my front door— at 9:45pm.